Indeed with a lack of real words to rhyme with ninth, needing to keep the patterns for this year’s posts, I resorted to a chap who just cheerfully makes stuff up to define “grinth” as “the peculiar little feeling of having noticed something nobody else did.” Clever?
More importantly after last month thrashing through a three month catch up on the daily photo summaries for September I am on target, or relatively near it having filled up by October 2 making sure that on September 30, the 273rd day of the year, there were that many photos in my flickr 2026/365 album.
Noticing I did this when no one else did, all in the grinth of it:
Hmmm this human sees there besides the usual pets, flowers, and prairie scenes, my a fair number of giant mushrooms. Draw no conclusions… or let’s slide the image over to ChatGPT to have it ponder:
This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in September. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add extra zest and exuberance to your writing. Or find some existential meaningfulness for this month. Go beyond the literal and the obvious, find a deep sense of meaning in this month’s span.
Prompt slapped into ChatGPT along with a scerenshot that showed just icons of all the photos from September 30.
Here comes the deep sense of meaning, oozing with intelligent insight.
September here is not merely a month, it is a field guide to being alive. The camera keeps finding the world in its wonderfully unruly middle state: mushrooms erupting from grass like little geological brains, bees plunging headfirst into flowers, berries glowing like punctuation marks, vegetables and meals turning sunlight into supper, while dogs and cats nap, investigate, and generally conduct important research into the meaning of existence. Around them stand the older witnesses: rusted chains, weathered barns, abandoned machinery, manhole covers, grain fields, collapsing structures, things made by humans and slowly being reclaimed by weather, weeds, and time. And then there are the skies, repeatedly enormous, dramatic, almost indecently beautiful, stretching over this little patch of prairie life. The photographs of friends, food, calculators, pencils, pets, and ordinary domestic moments keep the cosmic grandeur from floating away into abstraction. That may be September’s deeper message: everything is temporary, but temporary does not mean insignificant. A mushroom appears, a flower opens, a bee feeds, a cat sprawls in a sunbeam, clouds assemble their magnificent machinery, an old barn darkens under the stars. Rust happens. Dinner happens. Friendship happens. Night falls. The universe continues its gigantic, incomprehensible business, and somehow your particular response is to keep looking closely. September becomes a celebration of attention itself, a month-long declaration that the strange, the decaying, the delicious, the furry, the rusty, the beautiful, and the utterly ordinary are all worthy of being noticed before they vanish. You are not standing outside the universe taking pictures of it. You are one of its creatures, briefly awake, carrying a camera.
ChatGPT’s analysis of my daily photos for September 2026
September is a “field guide to being alive” oh yeah! and here is the deep message — “everything is temporary, but temporary does not mean insignificant.” Actually again, this is in so many ways rather comprehensive and sewn together in language that is… well far from my own.
Yet, well, not bad. And the phrase “the utterly ordinary are all worthy of being noticed before they vanish” is in many ways what I enjoy of photographing details.
But still with all that language, it really knows not what I do of the month. But maybe that is always what happens in all art, right? It’s a whole discipline and practice to interpret the meaning of imagery, without knowing completely what was in the creators mind. Heck, in this case the creator is unsure.
ChatGPT does what it was asked. It can identify rather well what is in every photo, event from those small sized versions. It then strings together words that do more than mention them. But, what about the mushrooms?
My first reaction was– how did I pick four times as the photos of the day the gigantic mushrooms? That jumps out at me. But the algorithm seems to not know how to do more than identify what is in the photos, yet has no lived experience to wonder- “what about the mushrooms?” How is this anything close to what I think of as thinking? I’d have to go back and re-prompt it with something like “did you notice all the mushrooms” toi which it would flow out some “Oh yes, forgive me, blather blather blather.”
I’m okay with playing this game and nudging it to go more zany, and can have some fun, but I’d be damned if I would ever use this in any other way besides this as an observation.
Color me conflicted.
Then again, I do not myself sit there and try to draw meaning from a months worth of photos. The meaning was in the daily doing, the editing and picking for whatever various reason.
Alas, the month that was ninth came and winth….
Featured image: Squares of Nine Squares flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license the geolocation and adjacent photos in flickr confirm this was somewhere on the UBC campus from 2012. I seem to have a sufficient number of photos to represent numbers that I have no need to have ’em manufactured by GenAI.
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Your photos deserve your voice in any and all evocations of what you’ve made! The AI stuff sounds pretty banal most of the time. It also has this weird cadence: a little too florid, a little too trying-too-hard, and in the end, more than a little annoying.
We want to hear the creator sing this song.