In this first of a series of year-end blog posts: The mystical midwesterners among us may be at least partially hallucinated, but as this post and our new state license plate reminds us, not all who wonder/range/surf are lost.
* * *
When I first used Chat GPT, for a variety of editorial and experimental purposes, I eventually got around to asking: Who is Lucas Wetzel from Kansas City. The answer surprised me.
This, in the parlance of AI models, (and as you’ve most likely read) is a “hallucination” — the AI model confidently spitting out facts that are in no way connected to reality. I’ve seen it happen a lot with other material, but watching it instantly invent a new identity for me made me wonder — did it know more about me than I knew about myself? Might it have some inkling where I’m headed?
When I re-entered my name and location with the same question, it told me: Lucas Wetzel is a professional soccer player from Kansas City who plays for the Swope Park Rangers. Which is actually the training squad for the city’s Major League Soccer club, Sporting KC. Interesting that of the two options, it chose the far lesser-known team. But in a way also much cooler.
The next week, while staying in a cabin on Lake Pomona, I picked up a copy of the Kansas state travel guide. There was a picture of a guy surfing, sporting a rakish beard and leaving an artfully carved wake. I had in fact waterskiied at this very lake many years ago, but I certainly hadn’t had that much facial hair. If it was my brother and I on a waverunner smoking a cig, however, that would have been a much more historically accurate and awesome cover shot.
The existential whiplash from all this reminded me of the timeless John Lennon song “Who am I? What am I supposed to be?
For some questions, the answers aren’t as important as much as how you ask them. As anyone who plays with AI can tell you, the detail and specificity of your prompts are a bigger influence on the quality of the response you get. You can feed it complex and seemingly disparate material and get back an impressively authored summary.
So just as an exercise, I cut and paste a few recent notebook entries from a running Google doc and asked chat GPT for help summarizing. It said:
Not bad. Maybe even a bit generous. But not inaccurate. It’s always nice to hear someone gets you, even if that someone is artificial.
These days when I ask chat GPT who Lucas Wetzel is, it answers: I don’t know. Though surely it knows more than it lets on, at least if I approach things indirectly. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to fill that void on this very blog with more tall KC tales to come, with a side of nostalgia, observations, and dreams.
Incidentally… this fall, I was walking back to my car from the youth soccer fields where my kids play and happened upon a Swope Park Rangers game just as the Rangers scored on the visiting team. The goal resulted from a deft cross over to the wing, where the left SPR striker could accurately be described as “ranging,” seemingly a style of play as well as an identity. He ranged far and wide, but eventually found the back of the net. May we all be so lucky.
*Recently there’s been some controversy over the official state license plate translating Ad Astra Per Aspera to “To The Stars.” (The travel guide apparently adopted the slogan before the license plate.) While virtually everyone in Kansas speaks fluent Latin, as a wider messaging campaign the translation of this state’s natural highlights makes sense. To The Stars!
**And to bring this post all the way back to the title, I want to close by saying that anything is possible, as my friend Neil has proved at Surf Anywhere, Canada, a pioneering outfit in engineering and setting up locations for river surfing. I’m proud of Neil and am glad to see we are each living our best landlocked beach boy existence.
lucas wetzel 