This Is Not a Toad

And other AI betrayals.
​
By Zach Hively

I know that AI is all the rage. I know. But I speak as someone who doesn’t fully understand AI: I don’t trust it.

Why not?

Well, I was thinking about writing about the toad that my dog pursued around the back yard the other night. I didn’t realize at first that he was pursuing a toad—the night was, as nights tend to be, dark outside, and the toad was hard to see. I thought he was interested in a particularly animated clump of grass.

I, too, because curious about the grass, and how it could possibly startle my dog. Then it jumped, and so did I.

I remembered immediately, with startling fuzziness, a book I read twenty-six years ago that taught me everything I know about dogs and toads—it was the novel Big Trouble, by Dave Barry, in which the dog encounters a toad and proceeds to hallucinate something or other. When I search for specifics on what he hallucinates, because twenty-six is indeed a lot of years ago, Google tells me there is not an AI overview available for this topic.

​But that’s not the main reason I don’t trust AI.

Befriender of toads.

So I grabbed my dog’s collar to prevent his own hallucinatory event. And I missed it. Because he didn’t have a collar for me to grab.

You see, I like to take his collar off at night. I figure it feels as good to him as taking off my pants at the appropriate time feels to me. Three hundred-plus nights a year, the collar comes off after we go outside one more time.

But not, of course, this night.

Without a collar to grab, I got my dog by the scruff of his neck. This he did not like very much. He is invested in being a Very Well-Liked Boy, and I can extrapolate that Very Well-Liked Boys seldom get scruffed.

Also, I am not an expert scruff-taker, so my dog slipped my grip and darted back to the toad in order to sniff at it some more.

The toad—which is generally more intelligent than we here give toads credit for—had hopped along to someplace else. Or so thought the dog. He sniffed everywhere, erratic, desperate to locate his new friend and/or toadie drug dealer.

Yet I could see that the toad, in its helpful way, had stayed put. He squatted in the one place in the immediate vicinity that my dog, for all his methodology, was not sniffing.

Ultimately I re-scruffed my dog and got him back inside. He was, as far as I could tell, unaccompanied by any vivid hallucinations.

I thought I might write something about all this. I also thought, Hey, this is not the first time I’ve seen a toad out here. Did I ever take a picture of one I can use as a Featured Image for this story?

​I searched the photos on my phone for “toad.” My phone returned only this one shot I took of, well, not a toad:

Not a toad.

As you can see, there is no toad herein visible to the human eye. The dog corroborates: he does not smell one, either.

Now, is this photo search feature a function of AI? I have no idea! But I’m inclined to believe so, purely because it did not work. No human could mistake this photo, clearly of a praying mantis, as the work of a professional worthy of publication. Not even here.

​Some things just require a personal touch. No AI could write this exact piece, because no AI has ever felt the panic that the local animal poison control people are all in bed at this hour. And you cannot tell me that you want to trust AI with ANYTHING when it has never, not even for one ill-timed second, wondered if toads can make people hallucinate too.