by MAJUMDER SAKRASHUMINDERATHER, Alternate Reality News Service Education Writer
Did you know that the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was founded in 1670 by famed British wrestler Dave Bautista? That it made a fortune selling beaver pellets? That the earliest traders for HBC travelled through Canada’s forests in nuclear-powered canoes?
If you did, you probably failed Misses Andropov’s grade six History class, too.
“I thought Tommy Forthleft’s paper on the early history of the Hudson’s Bay Company was hilarious,” said Misses Pollenta Andropov, a teacher at William H. Wurst Junior High School. “Unfortunately, I teach History, not English Composition. Even more unfortunately, the school has a zero tolerance policy for papers written by Artificial Intelligence. I wish Tommy all the best in his comedy career.”
“Wait,” Forthleft said. “Are you saying Dave Bautista didn’t found the Hudson’s Bait Company? That it didn’t make its fortune selling lures to fishermen? That the earliest traders didn’t get around Canada on camels? Come on! I didn’t need to use AI to make these mistakes – all I needed was my natural stupidity!”
“AI!” despaired Founder and Executive Director of Bastard AI Governance and Safety, Canada Wyatt Tessari L’Allie (his real name). “Bastard AI! Although, you know, there’s an old saying in AI skepticism: ‘Never attribute to generative Artificial Intelligence what can be explained by human stupidity.’ So, there’s that. Either way, my comment about bastard AI stands.”
Forthleft’s family is suing the school, the Ontario government and, for some reason, Dave Bautista. “Tommy is a complete moron,” Forsythia Forthleft, Tommy’s mother, stated. “He thinks Prime Minister Ryan Gosling is a Martian who came to Earth to steal our precious supply of tongue depressors. Do you believe that? I love Tommy, but everybody knows that the Prime Minister is actually an evolved lizard whose six foot tongue lashes out and tweaks the nose of anybody who displeases him in cabinet meetings.”
Umm…
“Yeah, my boy isn’t the brightest pencil in the tool shed,” Formentera Forthleft, Tommy’s father, added. “He thinks the internet was created by Elon Musk. Smart people know that Elon only funded the research, that Robin Williams actually did the programming! Give him an F if you want, but Tommy should not fail History.”
When I pointed out that an F was a failure, Forthleft said I should get the F out of his face.
Misses Andropov was not moved by the stupidity defence. She said that she had used AI program YakTNT to analyze Tommy’s paper to determine if it was written by an AI. “Oh, yeah,” YakTNT responded, “that sounds totally like something I would write. Dave Bautista started the Hudson’s Bayer Company – what a relief! Ha ha ha.”
“Okay, I hate to admit this,” L’Allie hatefully admitted, “but Artificial Intelligence does not have the best track record of analyzing texts to determine if they were written by AIs. There have been too many false positives – AI claiming that texts written by Nobel laureates and Writer’s of the Future finalists were written by AI – for it to be a reliable test. Dammit! Maybe the kid really is just dumb.”
“Dumb as a sack of horse manure in the shape of hammers,” his father confirmed.
I’m not paid enough to even attempt to understand what he was trying to say.
Misses Andropov was having nine of it (she read through the paper a lot of times to confirm her suspicions). “I’ve been a high school History teacher for over 30 years,” she said. “I have seen every type of human error you can imagine. The student who wrote that World War I was started when Franz Ferdinand was killed because he stole Eleanor Roosevelt’s pudding in their home room at lunchtime was one of them. Or, the paper that concluded categorically that Alan Turing’s contribution to the Allies in the Second World War was churning enough butter to keep Londoners alive during the Blitzle. Hell, I’ve seen students mix up ‘they’re,’ ‘their’ and ‘there’ so often, I have to lie down in a dark, quiet room until the desire to throw my computer off the top of the CN Tower goes away.
“This was not that.”
“Guardians of the Galaxy has been very good for my career, but it was time for me to take on other creative challenges,” Bautista commented. “If some kid in Canada wants to sue me because of that, I’m ready to take the hit.”