Artie Fishal ’30
Essay Enthusiast
The following is an real-life excerpt from Artie Fishal ’30’s mandatory essay on AI. It follows an incoherent paragraph about birding and seven-fingered women. The writer showed it to her friends, who asked if she was incapacitated mentally whilst writing—she wasn’t; she’d never do such a thing!
You probably think I’m just joking around to ease you into this essay. Bold of you to think that this isn’t the whole essay. But these jokes truly mean something too. I’m sure Paul Krugman talked about this in The New York Times. It’s the idea that Big Tech will have me using AI in the small things so the big things don’t look so big. If it can infiltrate my friend group and my relaxing time and my hobbies, why can’t it write my essays and make my music? After all, it’s become a trusted confidante for some of my friends. They use it to process childhood trauma and also what Gracie (or Ed, or Olivia, or Sabrina) said to them at lunch. It’s a crutch now, and it’s a bit scary. Oftentimes if my friends need advice they’ll ask the friend group and then ask Chat for a more concrete result. I don’t know. I don’t blame them. After all, most of their peers don’t even have fully-developed brains. At least Chat has all of human knowledge at its disposal.
I’m surprised because this essay is turning out to be surprisingly good. Maybe I’ll put it on Substack or something. That’s another thing where AI is infiltrating. There’s this pressure on everyone to create, whether it be a book or a magazine or a poem. Some people—and I hate to say this—just can’t create. To catch up to their peers, they rely on AI. I think Suno is a really cool thing, and it’s also terrifying. For those who don’t know, Suno is an AI music creation website, and it actually makes really cool music. You can feed it lyrics and it’ll produce it, or you can just have it write the lyrics and make the music. That’s scary for the B-tier artists, I know Gracie Abrams is shaking in her boots.
I think that sums up AI in a nutshell. It won’t replace the exceptional people of this world. But the B-tier? They’re in danger. As a college, Trinity should strive for all of us to be truly a specialist in something, because AI is just a high-quality generalist. I don’t know how Trinity should do that, but I think they can figure it out. I’ll be here for four years. You can hit me up for ideas if you must. But I bet you have some high-paid consultants that will help you out. I won’t do this work for free, of course.
Bye, y’all!
…Oh. It looks like I haven’t hit three pages yet. What else do I have to say about AI? I think how it’s integrated into things like Grammarly is quite unnerving. That’s because you don’t use Grammarly intentionally to make brand-new writing. You just want it to fix your spelling errors and your weird sentences. That’s what it’s for. You use it after you write. It’s crazy that you can be accused of AI usage for something like Grammarly, and it’s crazy that it’s AI. Everything is AI nowadays. It sneaks up on you. Scary scary.
Written at 11:59pm.
