Optimizing the fun out
Philippe Beaudoin · May 2, 2026
You know, one thing I spend a lot of time doing is reflecting on Artificial Intelligence and… doing crosswords! 😇
No, I’m joking, but it’s true. I guess at fifty, it’s a sort of rite of passage. Something written in the celestial algorithm: “At fifty, crosswords and curling thou shalt love.”
I submit with delight.
But today, these different passions collided. Except for curling. That’ll come.
I was doing my daily Wordle when I noticed the little “Wordle-bot” suggesting I compare my solution to its own. I gave it a try.
When you click on it, you’re offered a series of pages that deconstruct the problem and show you where you could have made better guesses. How to eliminate more words at once, how to maximize your efficiency. How to become “better” according to a definition of “better” that the New York Times editors imagine to be objective.
Being good at Wordle means solving it in fewer moves, right?
Except I realized that, far from increasing my happiness, this little robot was promising it a much shorter half-life. I instantly felt that if I kept using it, the pleasure I take in inventing a quirky five-letter word to start the game would be thrown back in my face as a “sub-optimal opening move.”
I realized that if I listened to the robot, I’d be letting it normalize my definition of happiness.
I realized that would be stupid.
The opposite of intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence is very human, my friends. It is designed by the editors of the New York Times and other winners of the current social game. People whom everyone tells, “You’re so smart, Mr. Altman!” and who end up imagining their worldview is objective. That the game they are playing is objectively better than mine. Better than my strange game where I pull a quirky word out of a hat every morning.
These “winners,” fueled by their worldview, strive to use logic to predict the future. They offer us their predictions with doses of certainty or probability. “We’re going to solve everything, we must accelerate!” or “If the probability of it exploding is 1%, we must stop everything!”
But accelerate what? Stop what? Research? The development of a specific thing?
We need to answer these questions, and any answer is anchored in a vision of the world. In the belief in a specific game.
Mine is that we all have our beliefs, our ways of playing… and some have the potential to make us happier. If we let the “winners” dictate how we play, we run the risk of being buried under Wordle-bots. Locked into a game that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence and everything to do with the people developing it.
If, instead, we allow ourselves to gently exchange with one another: “Ah! That’s how you play Wordle? That looks cool, I’ll try it!” then I have hope that the phenomenon we discovered with Deep Learning—our growing capacity to create sensitive things—will help us better understand ourselves and live better together.
❤️