AI in the South

AI In the South

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm.

Every industry.
Every city.
Every workplace.
Every teenager with a cracked iPhone screen and unlimited Wi-Fi.

But here in the South? We’re still squinting at it like it might try to take our biscuit.

It’s not that we’re anti-technology. Southerners were early adopters of a great many scientific breakthroughs: air conditioning, riding mowers, and drive-thru windows come to mind. 

It's just that AI arrived a little too fast, like somebody dropped a spaceship into a Waffle House parking lot and said, “Don’t worry, it’s real friendly.”

We’re cautious by nature. Not fearful, just… observant.

Most Southerners evaluate new inventions the same way we evaluate suspicious dishes at church homecoming: “Who made it? What’s in it? And is anybody else eating it first?”

AI is no different.

I asked a friend of mine what he thought about artificial intelligence. He said, “Well, I don’t trust anything that learns faster than I do.”

Another one of my neighbors loves it. Uses it daily. Writes emails, meal plans, and grocery lists with it. Says it saves time.

But he still won’t let AI pick his football bracket. “Some things,” he says, “require a human touch.”

Southern grandparents, meanwhile, approach AI the same way they approach any new technology: with deep suspicion, a little awe, and a strong desire to unplug something before it catches fire.

Then there are the farmers… God bless ’em. They’ve seen enough unpredictable things in nature. So a self-learning computer doesn’t scare them.

“Look,” one told me, “if AI wants to help bale hay, it’s welcome in my field. But if it starts trying to tell me how to do it, that’s when we’re gonna have words.”

Still, despite our skepticism, Southerners have a talent for quiet adaptation.

We’ll pretend we don’t use AI while secretly letting it help us with: recipes, weather questions, checking grammar on Facebook posts so nobody corrects us, and helping diagnose a host of medical ailments

You see, we’re not anti-AI. We’re AI-selective.

We’ll happily let it order our groceries, summarize an article, or recommend a playlist. But we draw the line at things like:

• telling us how to grill
• telling us how to raise our kids
• telling us which SEC team to pull for
• or speaking with too much confidence about subjects it clearly doesn’t understand (Like Jesus or “All My Children”)

But here’s what it all boils down to.

AI doesn’t scare the South. Lord, we’ve lived with unpredictable systems our whole lives.

But try explaining a Southern accent to a computer. Try predicting a Southern thunderstorm. Try getting Chat GPT to understand why two Southerners can have a 45-minute conversation without ever finishing a sentence.

Good luck.

We know who we are.
We know what we value.
And we adapt at our own pace.

Some of us will embrace AI with enthusiasm.
Some will tolerate it like a distant cousin who moved back home “just for a little while.”
And some will ignore it completely and be perfectly happy doing so.

But one thing’s for sure:

AI may be smart… but it still doesn’t know how to smell rain, or properly gossip,
or tell whether a person is “fine” or “Southern-fine,” or know what it feels like to see the old homeplace.

And until it can do that, I think we’ll be just fine.

Even if it does try to take our biscuit.