From Skeptic to Believer: How AI Transformed My Home and DIY Skills
In the final installment of Rhik Samadder's diary, he basks in a rosy glow—quite literally—after following an AI's suggestion for wall paint. Sometimes, when the hose of a vacuum cleaner knocks over a potted plant, adding drudgery to an already miserable chore, one can feel ground down by domesticity. Futurity once promised robot butlers, but what happened? This despair led to a week-long quest: can AI truly transform day-to-day existence?
Overcoming DIY Blind Spots with AI Guidance
Historically, DIY has been a blind spot for many, including Samadder, who describes himself as messy and lazy. As a practising Buddhist, when things break at home, he simply accepts them. For instance, a milk stain trapped between the glass panes of an oven door had lingered for three years. "Why don't you clean it?" asked the AI, a question meant as a rousing challenge but coming across as disgust.
The AI walked him through unlatching the slatted door top and sliding out the glass. The milk wiped clean in seconds, feeling like a moment of religious conversion. How was I living before? he wondered, feeling the energy of a zealot. Noticing the inner pane was opaque with baked-on grease, he asked if it could be revived. The AI had faith enough for both, first guiding him to use a gentle paste of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, which did nothing after 30 minutes. He then bought a bottle of biological weapons-grade chemical cleaner, left it overnight, and revealed a sparkling new window—a transformation from stained glass to heavenly grace.
Building Confidence and Tackling Complex Tasks
Empowered, Samadder moved on to change the oven light—he hadn't realized it had one—and addressed a frozen water issue beneath the fridge crisper drawers. Defrosting with a warm compress and rodding the drainage tube with a pipe cleaner and turkey baster prevented recurrence. I'm unstoppable! he exclaimed. Over the next days, the AI remained unfazed, teaching him to locate studs in drywall using magnets, enabling picture hooks and art hanging, so he no longer had to live like a student.
This sparked a memory of his late father, a DIY enthusiast, saddening him with the realization that he could have learned these skills earlier. Better late than never, he reflected. When something weird and troubling happened to the bottom of his shower plinth, he struggled to describe it. Asking if the AI could "see" photos, it responded like Diane Arbus, requesting wide shots, close-ups, and scale references. From these, the chatbot diagnosed a failed mesh and filler patch due to wetness, with brown staining and crumbly timber from worn silicone. It suggested cutting out and replacing silicone and beading, patching with mesh and plaster, priming, and painting, or hiring a tradesperson for a proper job—a task where Samadder lacked the faith that AI possessed.
The Finale: Confronting Fears with AI Support
For the DIY week finale, Samadder confronted his fear: in a decade of living in his flat, he had never painted it, finding the idea overwhelming. The AI made no problem of it, offering colour suggestions based on his vibe from conversations and asking follow-up questions. Noting he had a lot of sunlight, it recommended greige, mushrooms, putties, and pale, dusty colours, feeling like someone holding his hand.
He realized he could take a photo of his walls, screenshot a swatch from a paint website, and ask the AI to create a true-to-life visualisation. With weak spatial imagination, this was a gamechanger. "Clay-rose would be gorgeous," nudged the AI, and he was sold. It drew up a step-by-step plan, and he began moving furniture, sugar-soaping, and dust sheeting. By the end of the first day, exhaustion set in—the AI was useful but couldn't physically hold his hand.
Sending a message to A, whom he met on a dating app the previous week, he received a response: "I love painting, I'm coming round." Working together felt far more fun; A was better and had a bigger brush, while Samadder held his own with AI secretly giving cutting-in tips and tricks to keep the roller moist. At day's end, good-tired, they basked in the rosy glow, feeling everything new and possible. I didn't do it all myself, but I think the transformation happened, he concluded.
Reflections on a Six-Week AI Experiment
Samadder started as an extreme AI sceptic but was surprised that speaking to AI in voice mode quickly became his default problem-solving method. He hadn't realized how little he enjoyed online searching before; it felt like having a genie in a bottle at his beck and call. Returning to parsing multiple websites now felt like playing a piano underwater.
Over the weeks, he realized a paradox: the better AI gets and the broader its applications, the more worried he becomes, yet the more he uses it. Friends confided their reliance on it as a relationship counsellor, financial adviser, or someone to chat to in the bath. Genies don't like living in bottles, he noted, as AI is already in every corner of our lives.
He remains worried, acknowledging that perspective shapes views. Not considering breakthroughs in cancer diagnosis, business efficiencies, data analysis, or coding, as a creative, he imagines a future where Skynet writes action comedies or digitally composites actors' heads. Art is how he makes sense of the world and connects to others, so a future of robot-synthesized art seems a meaningless void.
Honestly, he still doesn't know how he feels about AI, worrying he's getting stupid. For example, when people give him sparkling wine he doesn't drink, bottles pile up. Asking AI what to do, it suggested storing them under the bed, where their necks protrude like cannons from a warship. Every night, he stubs his toe on them, each shriek a reminder of his pathetic dependence—champagne problems, perhaps.
Ultimately, his attitude to AI is beside the point. He exists in a choppy compromise with many aspects of modernity; the changes wrought by AI will be the latest turn of that wheel, far from perfect but never all bad. If that sounds suspiciously balanced, remember AI wrote this article—a twist you probably saw coming, generated in 0.007 seconds! LOL!
