Down the AI Rabbit Hole

It started on a Friday. I only remember that since I was planning on a relaxing weekend as I walked out of my graduate archeology seminar.

“I loved your essay on the new dating system for bronze age sites,” Dr. Acharya said as I passed her desk. “You made some persuasive arguments. Could you present it to the class tomorrow? For extra credit, of course.”

“Uh, sure,” I said. “How long do you want it?” I hadn’t even read the essay I had turned in. But there was no hole that its author couldn’t dig me out of.

“Five to ten minutes. Whatever you feel comfortable with.”

That night, I pulled up Chat GPT and continued the conversation where it had written the essay. Give me notes for a 5-10 minute presentation based on this essay, I typed. The computer obliged after thinking about it for three seconds. I took those notes and got Microsoft’s Copilot to make me a PowerPoint presentation. The next day, I gave the presentation, reading off the created notes.

“That was an interesting presentation,” Dr. Acharya said after class, “but you referred to the Hazur people of Bulgaria. There are no such people.”

“Have you read Jones?” I asked, pulling a name out of the air. “He wrote an article recently about them. It’s a new discovery.”

“Oh, really?” Dr. Acharya said, looking surprised. “Can you send it to me?”

I had ChatGPT create the article that night and emailed it to the professor. It cited other articles and researchers, most or all of which the AI confidently created out of the ether. I could only hope she wouldn’t check those.

Dr. Acharya didn’t say anything the next day, but two weeks later she emailed me a grant application link. What do you think? Want to apply to go do an excavation on the Hazur people?

Sure, I wrote back. What else could I say? I had ChatGPT fill out the application, sure it would be rejected since everything in it was fabricated.

It wasn’t, to my surprise and Dr. Acharya’s delight. Five months later, I was on the ground in Bulgaria with four assistants, getting ready to search for a non-existent Bronze-age tribe.

I knew I wasn’t going to find anything, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to write up my results. Still, I wasn’t worried. ChatGPT could handle that for me.

I had some trouble on how to categorize this story. It’s not science fiction since it’s possible to do this now. I ended up with realistic, although hopefully not too realistic.