Overwhelmed by a tremendous volume of anxious inquiries from seniors applying to college, the Winchester Thurston college counselors, Mr. David Weisbord and Ms. Alicia Oglesby, recently sought respite in the latest that modern technology has to offer. Working closely with Computer Science Department Chair and machine learning teacher Mr. David Nassar, WT’s college counselors have launched a new pair of chatbots designed to answer student questions about applying to college.

The new chatbots, named WeisBot* and OglesBot, respectively, have been trained on hundreds of thousands of emails from the email accounts of Weisbord and Oglesby. Nassar leveraged his considerable knowledge of artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms, as well as the labor of his enthusiastic CS students (enthusiastic about getting a good grade, anyways), to rapidly develop the models. 

Reportedly, the emails servers from college counseling had been drawing so much compute power as they strained to handle the stream of student emails that they were in fact the actual cause of CrowdStrike Microsoft outage over the summer. Much has been reported about the environmental impact of A.I. models, but in this unique case, the A.I. model is actually better for the environment than the emails. Said Nassar, “I’ve never seen anything like this before. How many questions do these kids have? Can’t they form a Discord server or something and just answer their own questions?”

“I can’t wait to catch up on years of lost sleep,” Weisbord told me, “I mean, so many of these student questions I’ve just answered time and time again. I send out these emails explaining everything, and people just don’t seem to read them!” Immediately after our interview, I, too, asked one of these uninformed college questions, and with a marvelous grin on his face, Weisbord rested his slipper-clad feet up on his desk, took a sip from his tanker-truck coffee (decaf these days: he no longer needs to stave off sleep), and referred me to WeisBot. 

Perhaps WT is following in the footsteps of a private school in London that has begun to integrate entirely A.I. taught courses into the school curriculum, of course with no deduction in tuition. A.I. is growing more and more powerful, and although there are questions as to whether this exponential growth rate can continue (owing in part to the phenomenon of A.I. models consuming A.I. generated material for their own training purposes, to the detriment of the integrity of the model), that moment doesn’t seem to have arrived yet. Might A.I. soon be teaching WT students about A.I.?

Of course, there are some duties that WeisBot and OglesBot can’t (yet) perform — such as meeting with admissions counselors or calming those parents that are even more stressed about their child getting into college than their child themselves (probably the most difficult part of the job for a college counselor) — but perhaps our Lord and Savior Elon Musk, in his infinite wisdom, will soon find a “solution” to that “problem.” Though, if the design flaws of the Cyber Truck are any indication, upon that eventuality, WT might have to let go of the adjective “college prep.”

As most informed observers of A.I. will doubtless be aware, A.I. models do have a tendency to “hallucinate”, that is, in the words of A.I. expert Gary Marcus, to “bullshit” and “[produce] content that has no real relationship to the truth,” but rather with what it thinks we want to hear. I quickly found this out when WeisBot told me that my Harvard supplemental idea — to write about how all I want in life is to be able to tell people, with a countenance punchable beyond belief, that “I went to a school in the Boston-area” — was “a truly profound idea that will indubitably win you immediate admission to Harvard College.” 

This example perhaps illustrates a fundamental flaw in WeisBot: whereas Weisbord tells you what you don’t want to hear, WeisBot, as is characteristic of A.I. models, has learned to tell you what you want to hear. Despite the best hopes of [insert WT admin here], who hailed the models as “another example of WT interdisciplinary innovation” (funnily enough, that’s exactly how they answered all of my questions, even one about why WT departments lost their individual printers on the grounds of equity, despite departments offering to purchase and supply their own toner…. or so I’ve heard**), Weisbord and Oglesby, it seems, might not be off the hook after all. 

Nassar fiercely denied that the A.I. model might not be up to snuff: “The A.I. knows! The A.I. is smarter than all of us — you just can’t see it yet! Soon, the A.I. will replace us all — even, no, especially the history teachers!” Nassar’s mind, it should be said, quite probably weighed heavily with the recent trauma of discovering that the Naragon advisory had stolen the longtime mascot of the Nassar advisory, the narwhal. Arbitration between the two advisories is ongoing.

No one, noted the ever-pragmatic Mrs. Sickler, considered that a simple FAQ page would have been the simplest solution to this problem.

* Full credit to Mr. Kevin Miller for coming up with the name “WeisBot.”

** Please do not hesitate to let me know if I have missed the nuance of this particular issue. I am forever curious.