If you're like me, the rapid development and success of artificial intelligence over the last few years feels like we are staring out over a cliff we are about to be pushed off. You look at a piece of writing or an image, and if you feel like AI has produced it, you feel cheated. Especially if it's being presented as art. The art and experiences we seek out were once valuable in part because of authentic human input that goes into these things. But now, AI has taken that element away.
If you do feel that loss is significant, funnily enough, your sentiments are shared with figures from long ago. Aestheticism, with its focus on pleasing the senses over all else in the value of art, had its critics in the late 19th century. Leo Tolstoy, in his rebuke of the movement, pointed to our relationship with food. Though we may enjoy food for the pleasure it brings us, the value of food is not merely its taste.
The experiences we seek out, too, can nourish us in addition to being aesthetically pleasing. More and more writers, movie makers, and theater performances, though, have opted to use artificial intelligence, which (sure, I'll grant) reproduces pleasing words and images, but without the human spirit. And so, while struggling with this reality, appropriately I find myself turning to sports and culinary experiences, which seem to be impervious to this AI takeover.
With the Raiders season underway, Las Vegans have an excellent opportunity to enjoy perhaps what may be the last truly human experience, enjoying a meal at a sporting event. I talked to the chefs making this happen for us to appreciate this more fully.
When we do our pre-shifts here, we end it with "this is our house." So, when we invite a guest into our house, we wanna give them the food that we eat.Gil Morales
Gil Morales, Executive Chef Concessions, explains the experience he's trying to create for sports goers, "When we do our pre-shifts here, we end it with "this is our house." So, when we invite a guest into our house, we wanna give them the food that we eat," says Morales.
Already, we have something beautiful that AI could never recreate. This macho sports phrase, "this is our house," used to inspire a territorial and protective motivation to win a football game, is turned into not only motivation, but also into a call for shared human experience
Morales will be making sure to bring guests' childhood favorites like bunuelos for the holiday game, but he also invites his sous chefs to bring in authentic flavor as well. "My sou chef Hannibal Osuna, brings his family's birria recipe. So we have birria egg rolls, we're doing a fusion of Asian Hispanic. So we got the birria egg rolls with the consommé. You know, a little lime, a little bit of mozzarella, provolone cheese in there for help with the bite, and some red onion," says Morales.
I got try this one, and that bite, as Morales describes it, was good.
And this gets at something else valuable in real, authentic experiences. Whether we have reckoned with this or not, spice, bitterness, pain, can be enjoyable. Chef Yoshi Kojima, Executive Sushi Chef for Silver & Black Hospitality, wielding a sharp blade, shares that there's a lot of pain to be found in the ocean. Some sea creatures, like the spiny sea urchin, are downright hostile. There's value in the pain of real life, like Kojima explains regarding his insistence on wild-caught fish. "It's all wild caught, not farm raised," Kojima says, "that's the biggest difference. They don't swim in a tank. So they actually swim in the ocean, so it's really firm, muscular. Wild caught is a lot different, healthier."
For Kojima himself, there is perhaps some pain as well. Kojima has been cooking for 22 years, saying he's stuck with it because of family, "I had no choice, it was forced onto me," he explains. Over time, though, he's learned to love what he does.
And that last part is what's important; he really does take great pride in the mission of accomplishing his vision for the suite experience, and the finality of the end of an event as opposed to the day-in and day-out of a restaurant.
"The restaurant is definitely like putting on a bandaid, every morning you go in and something is bleeding. You're just putting on a bandaid, putting on a bandaid, and it's never-ending. Over here, after every event we're clapping, we're celebrating for everyone who's been working really hard," Kojima says.
The love and the pain of family, the joy and the fury of winning or losing the football game, the walk out of the stadium at the end of the night. These are some of the experiences you can find at a Raiders game. I know not everybody engages with these concepts during their time at a football game; maybe I'm reading too much into things. But, I would encourage you to start looking for meaning in things like this, perhaps before they're gone.
