The supreme intelligence
Illustration by Cam DiVenere.
Dylan Hostetter, Opinions and Humor Editor
With all the recent advancements in technology, I’m surprised I am the first person to actually pull this off. You see, I was beginning to get tired of the whole college student lifestyle. All of the deadlines, studying and paying attention were really starting to be overwhelming.
Now, I could have been just like any other student and used AI to complete all of my assignments for me, but I was sure I could do better. I would not just use some generative AI program, I would make a robot duplicate of myself — with an AI brain — that could perform every scholarly function in my place.
At first, I had my doubts that I could pull something like that off, but lucky for me, my roommate is a computer science major. One night, I snooped through his laptop and pulled some random programs that looked to me like they should work. The night after that, I raided a local construction site to get the scraps I needed to build the body.
It took me a week to assemble the machine — I took every precaution to make the robot look exactly like me to avoid any suspicion from my professors. They were strict enough if they caught someone using ChatGPT to write an essay, so I could not imagine what they would do if they discovered what I was up to.
I have never felt more proud than I was the moment I turned on my robot. I connected the final wire in his head and his eyes began to glow. From the grit of his metal teeth he began spouting essays about 18th-century literature, chemical equations and up-to-date reports on the stock market. He had access to all the knowledge in the world.
I sent him off the next morning to take over for me while I could sit comfortably in my room and do exactly what I wanted: nothing. From what was reported back to me, it seemed as if my creation was a hit. My participation grades in classes increased ten-fold alongside my test scores, and no one could tell the robot was not the real me.
Though there was a problem. The AI implanted in his brain was all-knowing, and sooner than later people began to question my quick transition from mediocre student to veritable super-genius. I had to dumb him down a bit.
All it took was a little tinkering with his code, and I had limited his intelligence and drive to that of the average college undergraduate. I thought that would work, but with it came a new string of problems. The AI me, with his newfound purpose, had a newfound drive — or rather, the lack of it. Now that the AI was trying to operate at a college-student level it too had college student tendencies.
The robot I had built for pure efficiency began turning in assignments late because he “figured he could get to them later.” He stopped attending all of the clubs I signed him up for because he preferred to “sit at home and watch every TikTok ever over and over again all at once.”
He began threatening to stop writing all of my essays for me if I did not buy him Chipotle every day even after I explained to him that he could not eat real food because he was a robot. It was no use, he would just mash the burritos into his metal face and laugh at me.
Finally, possibly at the fault of pico de gallo corroding his circuit boards, he turned on me. I demanded he finish typing out a discussion board post as his eyes began glowing an evil red and he started chasing me around the room.
I barely escaped the icy grip of his aluminum fingers before pulling a can of Celsius — which he also made me buy him every day for some reason — from the fridge and pouring it over his head. Part of me was sad to see his wires spark and his eyes fade slowly into darkness. There was so much knowledge in that artificial brain of his — so much promise.
After dismantling what was left of his body, I had to get to work on that discussion board — and the rest of my missing assignments — on my own. Though I think there is a chance that before I destroyed him, he may have uploaded his consciousness onto the internet because I keep getting a strange message on my computer. All it says is, “I will have my revenge.” It could be nothing, though.
