I'm a little more sensitive to misinformation and mischievous malignment surrounding the humble microwave oven than the average normal person. I grew up in a household that had no microwave. My mother had heard some things about microwaves that scared her, about the dangerous lasers inside of them and all that, and I believe remains to this day a microwave non-user. Growing up I suspected her concerns were unfounded but had no absolute knowledge, bearing a 90s encyclopedia set and the more patchwork Internet of an earlier era to guide me, and I didn't know any other world in terms of the food we ate, so I never challenged the situation.

But let me tell you, I was mad when I did as an adult eventually acquire a microwave through marriage and discovered that they are really innocuous and easy to use appliances, and comparatively inexpensive to obtain and set up besides. A microwave in the house would have saved my mother and I from a tedious year of eating Subway for every other meal when our oven and cooktop became dangerously unusable and we couldn't afford the immediate costs of obtaining a replacement appliance.

We became known to the staff of a local fast food outlet because of people spouting fearmongering nonsense! I still stop sometimes, halfway through a meal with a piece of chicken in it, because I've started to feel queasy.

Making stuff up about irradiated food because you don't understand science is bad enough. But I'm finding myself left with an even worse taste in my mouth over the latest weird trend of disparagement I've noticed against microwaves. People are now dragging them as an analogy into critical conversations about generative AI and large language models, the latest of this decade's string of tiresome tech bro scams and the one that is unfortunately really catching on with the public. Too many people are using AI technologies like ChatGPT for things they are not fit for for unless you really don't know what you're doing, and on far too many occasions now I've seen this behaviour compared to adoption of microwaves, and this commentary widely celebrated by everyone who sees it without question.

And it really irks me, because microwaves are in every way the opposite of everything the likes of ChatGPT stand for.

The microwave is a wonderfully simple beast. You put in food, tell the machine how much microwave juice to put into it and specify some times, and you get out food that will be altered, maybe improved depending on your degree of understanding of how your inputs affect the outputs. It can take a bit of getting used to a microwave different to your usual one, but once you have a good grasp of the general principles you can struggle through to get good results out of most of the beasts. A generative AI system is necessarily complex and will always remain to some degree opaque. Understanding the system better will not guarantee better output and any gains you do make in learning to use it more effectively may only last until the next update, although if you understand it as well as you possibly could it is about as likely to make you not want to use it any more as anything else.

The usual thrust of the comparison between these two is that both microwaves and generative AI bear responsibility for the deskilling of individuals and the creation of worse outcomes in the affected fields (absolutely intrusively everything and cooking, respectively), and there is usually some humourous and totally fictional scenario offered in which a restaurant owner or other former oven user insists on doing all their future cooking with a microwave.

Turning to this latter part to begin with... trying to convey an anti-AI moral using this scenario is as absurd as it would be to conclude digital cameras are unfit for their intended purpose because some people don't understand how film cameras produce a different and sometimes artistically preferable result. Or to claim ebooks will damage our human society because some people don't see any use for paper books any more. The consistent issue here is the people who are getting unnecessarily excited about advances in technology to the point where they believe nothing that came before has any value any more. All of these technologies are themselves objectively providing tremendous value for all the many people using them. That some of those users choose to perceive exaggerated gains is hardly the fault of the technology itself!

But, you might protest, isn't generative AI the same: a technology with some positive uses that is merely overhyped? And to some small degree, the answer might be yes. ChatGPT and the bevy of dedicated 'vibe coding' applications that have sprung up like mushrooms of late can help with certain very basic programming tasks so long as the operator is competent enough to recognise when the application is steering them wrong with utter nonsense. Midjourney and other generative art applications can create passable if meaningless art with flaws that are only there for those who have eyes to notice. Very positive!

Who benefits, though, in the widespread deployment and normalisation of these AI applications? People who wish to profit, psychologically or financially, from work they do not have the technical competency or the time to complete. Some such people may deserve some small amount of sympathy for the reasons they find it hard to do the work without AI... most are merely taking advantage. On top of this layer of beneficiaries, squatting hoping we will not scrutinise them like we do the number of fingers in certain murky-looking portraits these days, there are also many individuals using investment into and control over this technology to substantially shore up their already unjustifiable positions of wealth and power.

Who loses out, then? People who have put tremendous work into developing marketable skills that they will now find much less marketable because AI can replicate them just badly enough. People who historically do not earn a robust living for their talents and are now put under greater pressure for genuinely pursuing them. On a wider scale, all of humanity loses as people are inevitably deskilled through not having the need, ability, or morale to invest in learning to do things 'the old-fashioned way', and we further lose access to authentic human art and workmanship as the algorithmic junk crowds it out.

Nobody is left worse off in the same way because you choose to have a microwave in your home. You're still contributing to the economy (for better or worse) by buying and preparing food; the microwave just makes for a minor detail in how it is invested with cooking energy. And microwaves certainly do not inevitably deskill their owners by moving them further away from possessing genuine cooking abilities. They are at worst indifferent participants in your cooking journey. In fact, having a microwave can put cooking back on the table if you are under whatever circumstances short on money or space or time. Of course, it would be absurd to claim that a microwave can take the place of more expansive cooking appliances, and I don't think many people are claiming anything of the sort. If anyone is, they are going to be put straight pretty quickly by the fact that it simply doesn't work that way, and unlike these tech bros talking nonsense with their little chatbots, it's a little harder to convince yourself that up is down when you, hungry, are cleaning an inedible mess out of every imaginable corner of your laser box.

In fact, if anyone is exhibiting a skill issue here, it's the people who want to lump the microwave with the thing that can't spell 'blueberry', never mind do anything useful to help prepare a bunch. Microwaves can really fly under the fingers of someone who understands their aptitudes and limitations. Obviously they can prepare specially-designed 'microwave' meals in a flash—and I'm reliably informed such meals have gotten far better over the years since I last tried them. They also give you easy access to preserved frozen vegetables which can be superior to fresh ones, depending on the quality of fresh produce where you live—or you have the option of freezing your own and easily restoring them for use! We might almost take the reheating of refrigerated or frozen meal leftovers for granted, but this capability makes the microwave a vital key in the work of batch cooking that can save time and money on the journey to eating well.

They are also a great quick, low-cleanup option for steaming fresh vegetables. If you're a parent or you struggle to feed yourself healthy meals, this alone pays for itself. On the 'sheer indulgence' end of things, there is the range of cakes and brownies and puddings, egg dishes, pasta dishes, and all kinds of other little recipes that actually lend themselves well to the microwave. In many cases, you can find people who will swear they are better this way compared to the conventional oven versions. For my part, microwaveable noodles are one of my favourite snacks, and mug cakes have saved me on many an occasion where I simply didn't have time to prepare a full oven cake but literally needed cake to survive. I will forever remember the day I was pregnant and increasingly miserable watching my diet to manage gestational diabetes. A little cake (sugar adjusted) would fit just fine into the day; it definitely wasn't safe to have a whole cake hanging around needing to be consumed in a hurry. The microwave gave me what I needed quickly, no fuss: thank you, laser box!

Yes, there is a whole swathe of recipes for which the conventional oven is the correct tool to obtain the desired characteristics of the meal. But the microwave is very useful on a daily basis, enables streamlining of the food preparation process, and even if it's all you've got for food preparation, you'll be happier with it than without.

So what the heck is with this 'microwaves are AI in a sexy laser box' meme?

I feel like there's actually an undercurrent of classism going on with this equating of microwaves to AI. The popular understanding of the use of microwaves is that they enable people to produce impressive-looking partially pre-prepared meals without understanding a bit of how to actually create such a meal from scratch. And there's an enduring cultural impression that the only food that would result from such a procedure is of a low quality, and the only people who would do such a thing are the uneducated and (connectedly) lazy. Conveniently enough, the people typically perceived as uneducated and lazy and who benefit most from such affordances are people without the resources to choose between many different options—or by another name, poor people. And if there's one thing you realise once you are a poor person, it's that there are a lot of people out there who think you don't deserve to enjoy any aspect of your life until you do something about your shameful status. Get back to your gruel, plebs! Stop taking the easy road out!

Can you see now where that AI connection may be firing off, as foolish and insulting as it is?

It's funny because there is a whole marketing universe built around convincing those who have the choice—that is, the wealth—that 'microwave eating' is totally okay if they do it under certain circumstances. You can have a 'cheat day'. You're a hard-working parent, so it's okay to pop some frozen nuggets in now and then. It's okay, because you know better. You're coming at this from a position of educated shame. You would never dare go so far as to celebrate this very low-class technology. When in fact, plenty of people in this situation of being able to choose are doing the exact same things people are looked down on for doing in their microwaves... in their regular ovens!

And that right there is what rankles with this microwaves/AI thing the most. It's punching down on a tool that makes a huge difference to a more vulnerable group, and doing it from a position of wide-eyed superiority—as if ovens alone don't enable you to ignore the finer details of cooking just as easily as microwaves.

Actually it's peculiar just how much discourse online revolves around being superior at people over food-related behaviours. Maybe it's just particularly satisfying as a sick burn: you don't even know how to feed yourself properly! But there is so much misinformation and pop wisdom in that space that goes unchallenged these days: healthy tinned foods being lumped in with 'processed' food, whatever that term even means; the celebration of the impossible goal of 'quitting sugar'; the notion that there needs to be a special class of food for children by default; and so on. Our ancestors would find us bizarre for even thinking about such things. As a species so many of us do not realise how much we've lost (and, to be honest, gained) over recent generations as a result of not having to know so much about obtaining and preparing food to survive. People are pointing the finger at the humble microwave as an agent of deskilling when the deskilling has already taken place because of other appliances such as the refrigerator, which is also actually a very good boy in your kitchen! Do you really want to know how to get along without these modern conveniences yourself?

If anything, the microwave is one of the tools that gives us a chance of fighting back against the future those shadowy generative AI profiteers are chasing: a future where almost every other human on the planet is disempowered and too uninformed to do anything about it. No matter the shoddy housing boxes they try to shove us into with kitchens that don't really do anything to earn the name while earning them a fortune in rent, no matter the way they try to steal our time in endless drudge work after they steal the jobs we could actually sink our brains and hearts into... we can still prepare some sort of warm dinner in our own domains with an affordable machine that just has to be plugged in somewhere. And that's at least something that might keep us dreaming of more.

In short: it seems too many people simply do not understand either microwaves or generative AI well enough to appreciate why the comparison is so absurd: they applaud it because something about it they have not consciously examined feels authentic to them. And it is true, as is so often said, that you do not need to be an expert in a topic to be able to make a related critique sometimes. But when one of the main objections against the adoption of generative AI to its current degree is the destruction of human achievement and human knowledge, it feels like it is in fact important enough to at least understand the main characteristics of the thing being disparaged, lest you find yourself disparaging something that has been and will continue to be a net positive in human lives, especially those that will be disproportionately harmed by the incursion of AI into everything.

So can we please try to find a better analogy for this one, before I snap and shove someone bodily into the laser box? Because there's going to need to be a lot of chopping or squishing to make that work, and that's going to really mess up its cooking capabilities.

P.S. Yes, I know that microwaves and lasers have differing properties and are not really interchangeable terms. What are you going to do about it... cut me with another really unsuitable analogy?