Next year will mark a brave step towards the future of academics at WVU, as the green light has been given to two brand new majors in “Applied Artificial Intelligences”. These new degree paths will no-doubt thrust stars into the eyes of those who believe showering is a waste of time, and who refuse to wear anything but the same unwashed anime-ahegao hoodie everyday. To see how the students of WVU felt about this ‘brave new world’ in the making, we took to the downtown campus in search of opinions. During passing interviews with people majoring in things that were actually real, and interesting, we recorded a Civil Engineering student stating his belief; that the new major was “nothing short of genius”. We of course asked him, uh… why? Because, I mean, you really gotta defend a claim like that, and he responded with the perfectly sound explanation that “for years and years we engineers have been considered the smelliest, most repulsive majors on campus, and finally there’s someone to punch down on”. He went on to say, that “It’s just nice to win for once, you know?” Another interviewee, an art history major, flatly remarked upon the situation that they “just might hang themselves”.
After gathering opinions from the bearable, insightful, and truly human people of WVU, we knew we needed to bite the bullet. We wanted to see, smell, and simply observe the people taking advantage of such a cowardly and sacrilegious opportunity. After finally managing to contact one, we made the brave choice to send our youngest, and most punchable intern straight to the source, so we could learn more about what exactly these “people” are like. Upon entering the dorm room of this specimen, [he wouldn’t agree to meet anywhere in public, citing a fear of the sun, and socializing, and good posture, and stairs, and eye contact, and pants, and pretty girls, and regular looking girls, and socked feet, and etc.] our intern was, “nearly leveled by the stench”, and “couldn’t find a spot of the floor to step on that wasn’t covered in clothes, discarded dining hall takeaway boxes, or some form of organic refuse”. The interview, luckily, was quite short. Owing to a pure repugnance which streamed out from every crack and crevice of his Dadisman accommodation, both parties agreed to cut it at a measly forty-seven and a half seconds. Our poor misfortunate intern did however, manage to acquire two quotes from the young “person”, which can only be described as gems.
When asked what the unnamed man was interested in learning from this new program, he was quoted as unironically stating that he, “can’t wait any longer” to, “have any kind of hyper-realistic furry porn, at any time, all the time”. Perhaps we could at least appreciate his sincerity. He followed up with what might have been the worst thing one could say in this situation, letting us know that “the AI models can be instructed to remove their moral compass, so, you can uhmmm… y’know…”
The Following thirty seconds of grueling silence between interviewer and interviewee were described by our intern as “Just downright bone-chillingly horrifying. You could tell it was the longest he’d been in the presence of a human being in the past three weeks”. The true underpinnings of what he aspired to achieve with the invocation of the term “y’know” are nearly certainly in-line with any of your very worst guesses. The one upside that we were able to come up with in light of all this, was the fact that these classes have great potential to boast record-low attendances, and therefore may possibly move fully onto Zoom. This could certainly save all of our nostrils, eyes, ears, and other senses from interactions with those majoring in AI studies, which might just make life on campus a little better for us all. So are these new AI majors truly “genius”, you may ask? Perhaps, perhaps they are Dear Reader. We at the Sunnyside Instigator, believe that only time will tell.
