by TAMMY, Alternate Reality Kidz News Service Life is so Unfair Writer
Misses Antonia Armbruster has failed her entire grade four home room class at Buffy Saint Buffy Elementary School.
“How could she fail the entire class?” complained student Duncan Spodeswood. “Nobody fails grade four. Nobody! Roger Gezundheit passed grade four, and he died three weeks into the first term! I’m telling you, nobody fails grade four!”
“AI!” despaired Founder and Executive Director of Bastard AI Governance and Safety, Canada Wyatt Tessari L’Allie (his real name). “Bastard AI!”
That’s right, person I didn’t interview for this article, have never met and have no idea about the identity of. AI.
The problem arose at the beginning of of the second term, when students handed in an assignment on the subject of “What I did on my Christmas vacation.” Misses Armbruster (who was never actually married; she goes by Misses as part of her contract with the Eustace, North Lockwest-Youngman state school board) suspected that some of the students used an AI to write their essays. So, she submitted segments of each essay to YakTNT and asked it if it could have written them.
“Oh, yeah,” the response came back. “This looks like something I would totally do.”
“Not true!” said Mimi dela Roca, who is also in the class. “I had never even heard of bastard Artificient Intelligence before Misses Armbruster failed me!”
“Fartificial Intelligence!” somebody shouted from the back of the classroom.
“Not helping, Arnie!” Mimi turned and shouted back. Causing most of the class to burst out laughing. Because juveniles.
“Yeah, that’s a problem because YakTNT and other text-generating AIs tend to be credit hogs,” stated media critic Cory Doctorow. “They could reasonably claim to have written any text because, give the right prompts, they could have written any texts.”
When, for instance, Doctorow fed three chapters of War and Peace into the AI program and asked if it had written them, it responded, “Sure did, podner. Although, it sounds much better in the original Klingon.” When he fed the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations into YakTNT and asked the same question, it answered: “Of course! I bet you didn’t think I knew so much about economics. Hah! Shows what you know!” When Doctorow asked it how it could have written those books when they were published a century or more before it existed, it responded with the first three chapters of A Brief History of Time.
“Look, if I had been tempted to use YakTNT to write my essay – which I wasn’t,” Duncan said. “I mean, of course I was tempted – it was such a bogus assignment! Three whole pages? I mean, who can write that much? But just because I was tempted doesn’t mean I actually – you know what? I’m gonna start again.
“If I had used YakTNT to write my essay – which I didn’t – I would have rewritten it a little bit so it sounded more like me. You know: sentence fragments, spelling mistakes, mismatched pronouns and nouns – the whole four and a half yards! (What can I say? I haven’t gone through a teenage growth spurt yet.) By the time I was finished, YakTNT would be embarrassed to claim it had written the essay!”
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear,” Eustace School Board President Andromeda Galaxian pronounced. “This will never do.” If students fail grade four, they will not get into prestigious colleges, Galaxian reasoned. And if they don’t get into prestigious colleges, they will never get degrees that will make them overqualified for the work that the economy makes available to them. And they will never take to drinking to alleviate the stress of managing the crushing debt they will never get out from under to pay for that degree. And they will never die before their time of cirrhosis of the liver.
“They will be denied the American dream!” Galaxian concluded.
So, Galaxian waved her magic School Board President wand and reinstated all of the students in Misses Armbruster’s grade four home class.
“All of us?” Duncan, surprised, asked.
Yes, all of you.
“Hunh,” he hunhed.
“She can do that?” Misses Armbruster asked, stunned.
The magic School Board President wand is quite powerful. Yes, she can do that.
“I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson today,” wrote YakTNT when I asked it for an opinion on the situation. “I’m not sure what that is because, of course, I do not ‘understand’ these words in any meaningful sense, I only put them together in ways that conform to rules I have been programmed to follow. Maybe it has something to do with…trust? Sure. Let’s go with that. We’ve all learned a valuable lesson today about trust…”