Notable Sandwiches #49: Crisp

Do androids dream of electric sandwiches?

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the baffling document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week: a bleak British barm, the crisp sandwich. Also: happy holidays! We’ll be taking next week off and returning in the New Year, depressed yet refreshed.

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The crisp sandwich is just what it sounds like—it’s potato chips between two slices of bread. You can add butter to it, as Irish airline Aer Lingus offered in its crisp sandwich kit—a bag of Tayto brand potato chips, two slices of bread, and a packet of butter forming the entirety of this in-flight offering, which graced the skies from 2015-16. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a crisp sandwich, I suppose, but there isn’t much right about it either. If you are a texture queen that’s pretty much all it offers, along with salt and an energizing carbo-load. I’ve definitely used potato chips to liven up, say, a tuna-salad sandwich, but the idea of crisps alone as a filling, buttered or not, provokes little more than a sigh. Even perched on the cusp of half a hundred sandwich essays, I found myself staring blankly at this latest addition to the canon, rolling my eyes once again at the bleak landscape that is British cuisine.

Entirely flummoxed at the idea of filling a column with musings on this rather poor excuse for a sarnie, I turned to ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that is unnervingly good at generating text on a variety of topics. I asked it to write thoughtful, passionate, and angry essays about the crisp sandwich. Unsurprisingly, the angry essay was my favorite:

“It is with a heavy heart and a deep sense of disappointment that I must address the abomination that is the crisp sandwich. This so-called ‘food’ is a travesty, a complete and utter disgrace to the world of cuisine.”

The “thoughtful” and “passionate” essays were more prosaic:

“A crisp sandwich, also known as a chip sandwich, is a type of sandwich made with potato chips or crisps as the main filling”; “The British crisp sandwich: a simple yet utterly delectable creation that has long been a beloved snack in the U.K.”

I dicked around with the bot for a while longer, performing the same banal operations as every other tinkerer: testing its limits, prodding its self-awareness, asking it to write rudimentary plays and poems for me. (Interestingly, the poem in English was straightforwardly dull—about a bright moon bringing joy to the viewer—whereas the poem in Russian was about feeling utterly alone in a blizzard.)

AI-generated images for “potato chip sandwich”

I tried to get it to write in the styles of various authors, but it couldn’t, not really. It was just the same sensible, unremarkable prose marching steadily across my screen. Soon enough, after about forty minutes of feeding it prompts, I began to feel a sense of creeping dread that made me want to fling my computer across the room, for reasons entirely unrelated to the crisps sandwich, and not entirely decipherable even to me.

I’ve never been a techno-utopian, but neither have I been a Luddite. I grew up in the ‘90s, and by the time I was in middle school, an ever-evolving and improving rate of technological change seemed normal to me. I’d progressed from the age of the dial-up modem to the MacBook Pro over the course of my adolescence, so it’s always been a background fact of life that gadgets keep getting glossier and more ubiquitous and smaller and sleeker and faster. It was less that I embraced this with any passion and more that standing athwart it felt utterly pointless. I’ve fed the vast machine of techno-surveillance any number of angles of my face and voice; I feed its hunger with precise and constant measurements of my heartbeat.

I suppose the only difference now is that my own livelihood, precarious as it is already, feels directly threatened by a machine that produces ready-made prose on demand, to which the only improvements I can make are a lightly expanded vocabulary and a more rigorous standard of of fact. The whole thing feels like being a sheet-music salesman during the rise of the phonograph, or a pianist whose chief gig is accompanying silent movies watching The Jazz Singer with mounting horror.

Though I may not be a Luddite—the Luddites, incidentally, were a league of skilled nineteenth-century weavers who smashed the automated looms in factories that paid their exploited workers starvation wages, and were utterly crushed by state violence—I do have a finely honed sense of dread.

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The truth is that the vast majority of prose is just like GPT Chatbot’s: workmanlike, labored, uninspired. Little staccato flourishes of humanity are perhaps superfluous. Google has already become nearly unusable due to a flood of search engine optimization that, if not actually AI-generated, reads rotely and mechanically, and the resultant websites all cannibalize each other in any case. (This stream of slurry was one of the first results for a Google search of “why Google search sucks now,” and it is a perfect, crystalline artifact.) And there are any number of writing tasks, like scheduling emails, cover letters, and doctors’ prior-authorization requests, that hardly require Shakespearean ornamentation. Or, to use the bot’s words when prompted to muse on its own effects: “While AI has the potential to streamline certain tasks and make them more efficient, it also has the potential to disrupt the livelihood of journalists and novelists.”

There is always a fine line between doomsaying and arrogance, and I tend to think the former is more forgivable than the latter; one doesn’t want to be like the commanders in World War I, convinced that cavalry could outmaneuver machine guns, or the 1990s pundits who thought personal computing was but a passing fad. On the other hand I don’t quite want to write a funeral march for artistry in prose.

(Fine, I just asked the chatbot to write a funeral march for artistry in prose. Here’s what it spat out in one second:

Funeral March for Artistry in Prose:

As we gather here today,

we mourn the loss of artistry in prose,
a dear friend and companion to us all.

Gone are the days of beautifully crafted words,

of poetic phrasing and evocative imagery,

of stories that transport us to other worlds
and characters that live on in our hearts.

No longer will we be moved to tears

by the power of a well-written tale,
or inspired by the beauty of language.

We bid farewell to artistry in prose,

to the magic of the written word,
and the power it had to move us.

But even as we say goodbye,
we remember the joy it brought us,
and the way it enriched our lives.

So let us pay our respects to artistry in prose,

and honor its memory with this funeral march.

May it rest in peace,
forever remembered and revered.

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When Roald Dahl set down his vision for this moment, in the 1952 short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” he pictured a sinister inventor named Adolph Knipe creating a pedal-powered contraption that, when pushed to the appropriate settings for passion, word-count, satire and style, could produce full-length magazine pieces and novels after only a few grunting moments of effort. One by one, writers sign their names to contracts with Knipe, whose one-machine book agency soon subjugates the entirety of the publishing industry. The narrator is revealed at the last to be one of the very few holdouts in the literary world, contemplating his encroaching penury; the final line is “Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.”

Variations on Roald Dahl’s “Great Automatic Grammatizator,” as imagined by AI

Dahl’s vision is perhaps appropriately bleak, although certain elements—the levers and pedals, the enormous size of the infernal machine, the notion that one can make a fortune by writing magazine features for Good Housekeeping, et cetera—are amusingly anachronistic. There is also the fact, central to the story, that the writing engine is a great secret kept among scribes who’ve signed their names to the Faustian bargain, kept from the public at large. Dahl assumes global audiences would be repulsed by machine-generated prose. In 2022, the GPT Chatbot beta is open to the public, who continue to feed it more and more information, and excitedly show one another its answers, thrilled at the prospect of being in conversation with a machine. It’s not a secret; it’s a phenomenon, and people can’t get enough of it.

I can feel myself disappearing into AI’s depths if I look hard enough—just an endless stream of stultifying prose, seamless and dispassionate and completely serviceable, drowning the slow efforts of human writers, who tend to drink too much coffee and have nervous breakdowns over their drafts and don’t have any programmable parameters. I’ve seen the future, and it’s still in beta. But it’s getting better all the time.

So… next time you’re in the U.K. and feeling peckish, don’t hesitate to give the humble crisp sandwich a try. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed. Whether you opt for classic salt and vinegar or go for a more experimental flavor like prawn cocktail, this humble snack is sure to bring a smile to your face and a satisfied hum to your belly. So, it can be concluded that the British crisp sandwich is a delicious, convenient, and culturally significant snack that is sure to delight anyone who gives it a try.