College bans use of “natural intelligence”

In a shocking move, a college in the United States has decided to ban the use of “natural intelligence” among its students and faculty. According to the college administration, human intelligence has a tendency to make errors and inappropriate comments, and as such, poses a threat to the safe and respectful learning environment the college strives to maintain.

Starting next semester, all students and faculty will be required to rely solely on artificial intelligence for all academic and administrative tasks. This move is expected to increase efficiency and accuracy, as well as reduce the risk of offending anyone with poorly chosen words.

“We have conducted extensive research, and our findings show that artificial intelligence outperforms human intelligence by a significant margin,” said the college’s spokesperson. “In fact, our AI system has an error rate of only 0.00001%, compared to the human error rate of 10%.”

While some students and faculty have expressed concerns about the ban, the college administration assures them that they will receive training on how to use the AI system effectively. They also point out that the AI system has been programmed to recognize and correct any biases or discriminatory language.

“It’s a win-win situation for everyone,” said the spokesperson. “We get to eliminate the risk of offensive comments and increase accuracy, and our students and faculty get to experience the cutting edge of technology.”

As expected, the announcement has caused quite a stir, with many people expressing disbelief and outrage on social media. Some have even joked that the college should just replace all its students and faculty with robots.

However, it seems that the joke is on them. The college’s administration has just released a statement clarifying that the ban on human intelligence was just a prank, and that they have no intention of implementing such a ridiculous policy.

“We apologize for any confusion or distress our previous statement may have caused,” said the spokesperson. “We just wanted to remind everyone that there is no substitute for good old-fashioned human intelligence, flawed as it may be.”

NOTE: THIS ENTIRE PIECE IS SATIRE!

No college to my knowledge has made such an announcement.

Here’s the big twist, though: a text-generating artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, wrote the above based on my prompt:

“Please write a subtle satirical piece about a college banning the use of human intelligence (call it “natural intelligence” at first, but use the term “human intelligence” later) because of its tendency to make errors and inappropriate comments. Favorably compare artificial intelligence to it, and make up percentages about the number of times they both make errors. Make it funny at the end and say something in the last part that will make it obvious it’s a joke. Thanks!”

I thought it did pretty well! I really liked its sentiment at the end. As an “AI Polisher” (a term I recently coined for a human writer that would improve an AI’s output by doing fact checking, smoothing the language, and possibly light content editing), I would have added a fake college name.

It also didn’t understand that I wanted the last paragraph to make it obvious that this piece is satire, by saying something clearly ridiculous. I tried asking it to rewrite it and give me an alternative, but it still didn’t get what I wanted. I decided to just go with its original and explain this here.

I’m interested to know what you think. Did you know it was a joke right away? Did you realize an AI had written it before I told you? You can comment on this post or, and this is probably better, reply to me on Twitter:

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