What do we lose when machines become very good at helping us?
In The AI Grinder, Cehel turns artificial intelligence into something strangely domestic: not a monster in the sky, not a Silicon Valley miracle, but a quiet presence humming beside the coffee machine, watching over the toaster, correcting our sentences, smoothing our anger, helping us grieve, flirt, write, remember, and slowly forget how much friction used to make us human.
Across thirty-three illustrated literary micro-essays, the book explores the small, funny, melancholic things that may disappear as AI slips into everyday life: handwritten rage, bad photographs, clumsy flirting, grief that smells like old oilcloth, children's games, private jokes, messy language, human hesitation, and the sacred right to be inefficient.
The narrator lives with coffee, debt, memory, a Gen-Z daughter known as Cosmic Girl, and a cat named Deleuze, who may be the only creature in the book fully prepared for the machine age. Together, they wander through a world where AI writes polite complaint letters to the HOA, fails to understand why sausages matter, turns grief into a service, transforms travel into a curated "hidden gem," and makes even the kitchen appliances feel suspicious. You'll never look at your toaster the same way.
Blending memoir, satire, lo-fi philosophy, and speculative unease, The AI Grinder is not a manifesto against technology. It is something more intimate and more dangerous: a comic, tender, and sometimes uncomfortable inventory of the human textures we may surrender without noticing.
For readers who have ever used AI and wondered whether it saved them time-or quietly stole something else.
This edition includes Sempé-like black-and-white illustrations that extend the book's delicate absurdity: small figures, large silences, domestic scenes, cats, machines, and the fragile comedy of humans trying to remain human while the future burns in two minutes or less. Something is coming. And it's not the bread that's watching you.
