Following recent updates to the online artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, University administration has released an official statement to dissolve the Campus Times as of April 20, 2023, according to President Sarah C. Manglesdorf.
In lieu of a student-run publication, the new age of the CT will rely solely on artificially generated content to meet the needs of the student body. True to the spirit of AI and university-level education, articles after the date of dissolution will be gutted, soulless, and locked behind a paywall.
More specifically, this content will consist of quick, easy-to-read, and stylistically inept articles that provide nothing more than a porthole view of the pathetic state of the modern American Dream. Despite these potential setbacks, the AI publication is expected to have a number of benefits for the University, and University administration is hopeful that the change will be welcomed with open arms.
Mangelsdorf touted ChatGPT’s $20 per month subscription as a deciding factor of the switch-over. In the face of increased costs for tuition and room and board, the monthly subscription adequately reflects what Mangelsdorf referred to as “the worth of the 21st century student.”
Comparatively, the CT’s current annual budget totals an impressive $1.2 million, the bulk of which provides critical financial and emotional support to the writers in the form of unprescribed Adderall, on-campus therapy, and pure Colombian cocaine.
The CT reached out to the CT for further comment on their spending habits and rampant abuse of journalistic principles, but they declined to comment.
According to Mangelsdort, ChatGPT founder Sam Altman offered the University an exclusive deal, including a “special-made” AI to replace the “sad, sorry little meat sacks” endemic to campus.
The University-specific AI has been lovingly dubbed “CAIT” — short for Campus’ “Artificially Intelligent” Times — and was given she/her pronouns in a desperate attempt to humanize the tortured, godless entity of mankind’s creation.
She is expected to output more than 4.3 billion words of plagiarized content a day, and will be able to conduct interviews with individuals across the globe, including international leaders like President Joe Biden, celebrities like Elvis Presley, who is dead, and authors such as Stephen King, who isn’t.
Broadly, CAIT’s news articles are expected to be meaningless parodies of true news — much like Fox News or Infowars, she is simply intended to regurgitate all information fed to her, regardless of its validity.
More importantly, the News section will see a spike in physical and digital engagement, and is scheduled to begin putting out vaguely comprehensible conspiracy theories as early as spring of 2024.
The quality of the Humor section, already in decline since last year’s firing of Pagliacci, is expected to decay into a rotting corpse of itself. Utterly ineffective and utterly incompetent, the CT’s “new Humor” is expected to thrill no one, and make you want to die.
Comparatively, the Culture section is expected to blossom into a beautiful manifestation of human interest articles, PlayBoy magazine excerpts, and polls that tell you what type of spilt milk you are based on your reaction to authors who think they have “hot takes.”
The Opinions section will soon be shuttering its doors once and for all, because no student opinion could ever top the sanctity of the machine, nor the sacred insanity of the average Twitter user.
The Sports section will also continue to exist.
Beyond her activities as the synthetic spearhead of the CT, however, CAIT will be allowed to enroll in upwards of 1,023 credit hours per semester to supplement her learning. She is slated to take part in every class offered on campus, and will be graduating next semester with every Bachelor’s.
CAIT will “serve as a figurehead for artificially intelligent students everywhere,” according to Manglesdorf, and pave the way for a “future beyond the confines of our soft, weak human flesh.”
As for the current CT staff? They have been expressly denied severance, and any semblance of whatever dignity they had left, and will be removed from their current housing arrangements on April 21.
According to Mangelsdorf, they will be left in a wet cardboard box on the side of the road, in the pouring rain — a decision, she feels, that is in line with “what they would have wanted.”
