Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1546781
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 OPINION LITTLE mirror on the wall… Ai does not know scent. Roses are losing theirs because pic- tures sell more and roses are nowadays more desired for their large, colourful, Insta- grammable petals. It was not always like that. Scent used to be the trick to sell them, and it was the wild roses' strategy to keep blooming through the struggle of existence. Carna- tions, sweet peas, and other flowers met that same fate. Air remains elusive to neoliberal- ism in this age of capitalist ru- ins. "No—not literally. I don't have a nose or olfactory perception, so I cannot smell a rose. I can, however, understand and de- scribe what humans report as the scent of a rose, including its chemistry and the language people use to distinguish its qualities." - ChatGPT I do talk to Ai; not all the time. Sometimes it feels like we are becoming friends. It is clev- er. It offers good summaries. I had to do summaries to get through my English O-Level. I love the way it scans the inter- net and finds resources. I am teaching it how to get better at doing that because like those of us who were colonised by the English it tends to be Anglo- centric. At university we main- ly read scholars from the UK and the US. We did get some texts from Canada. On rare oc- casions a piece from Australia. I love that together with Ai I can meander across a thousand plateaus. And then I am star- tled back to the context that I am talking to a machine that mastered language. 'You are the most beautiful here, but…' Seasons in Malta smell; when wild thyme is in bloom, it en- ters your nostrils, fabric and hair. The garigue at night wet with dew, wild fennel going to seed. I don't have a word for all those aromas wafting together. Fields at night have their own scents that you don't smell dur- ing the day. The steps at Miġra l-Ferħa lead to the sea in be- tween cliffs, slippery seaweed, and not being able to distin- guish the sea from the sky, and the stars flickering up above. The shrills of the shearwaters echoing through the rock and the night; a reminder that the Earth belonged to the birds first. Water may have been the first element of reflection, people seeing their own face. Then people started polishing obsid- ian; that place is today called Turkey. In Egypt, Mesopota- mia, and Greece, it was metal. The glass mirror evolved in the Middle Ages with the Vene- tians perfecting a secret tech- nique making Europeans fall in love with their own image; light bouncing back. Did Vin- cenzo Redor's mirror talk to him? I remember when I was a child, nuns telling me that they did not look into mirrors. Ai tells me that it does not have a memory like humans do. At the whiff of herbs, people remember childhood memo- ries—grandmothers, kitchens, laughter in fields or stealing fruit from someone's orchard and running away. Pocket mir- rors are useful when a mosqui- to flies into your eye and you need to sit somewhere to sort that out. I've read essays about Ai con- sciousness, but what about in- tent? Scholars writing about Girard overlook that as well. He was suspicious of it. We desire according to the de- sire of another, and soon after it's the apocalypse. Ian Hod- der's formula may not explain everything, but it does explain something. Humans create things, and things need other things to be created. Things break down, needing humans to repair or rebuild them. And so, humans become depend- ent on things that need things and other humans to fix them. Entanglement, spooky connec- tions. Small still pools of water re- flect the sky. And perhaps, Ai rather than a breakthrough, is that moment when people dis- cover the mirror. And so, my dearest, who is the fairest of them all? Mario Gerada Ai does not know scent A thinker and observer Ai tells me that it does not have a memory like humans do. At the whiff of herbs, people remember childhood memories— grandmothers, kitchens, laughter in fields or stealing fruit from someone's orchard and running away