By Katia Chatskis
Oh lord, a satire? What is this unimaginable burden? ChatGPT, write me a satire real quick! Sure! Here’s a short satire for you… Wow, that was remarkably easy. Let me just paste in the requirements and voila! I have an apt satire ready to click submit on and move forward with my life. It took me less than a minute, now I am all done with my AP Lit homework. What is a satire? Who cares, I don’t need to know if ChatGPT does!
But really, what’s with all the worry surrounding a harmless digital AI? Chat’s here to help us delegate all the pointless, superfluous, redundant work that students really don’t need to do. What does actually writing a satire do for a student? It’s not like it teaches us to do taxes or something useful. It’s not like anyone needs critical thinking or creativity in the workplace or in their future. Eliminating the need to sit down and think for ourselves, ChatGPT allows for the extra time to lounge about, flick through TikToks, and take endless photos for the perfectly curated Instagram feed. Really, this satire assignment is just ridiculous. Good thing I’ve got trusty ChatGPT to alleviate me from my burden, 400-500 word satire coming right up!
In this digital age, the need for actually doing school work has plummeted. Apparently, this has teachers worried about loss of individuality… but I don’t even know what that word means. Nor do I know what a satire actually does. It’s just like a joke, right? Anyway, everyone’s all worried about the rampant use of Chat, but really, who needs to form their own opinions if they can all share the one that Chat gives them with a quick generation? I guess we could sit and think about stuff, but like… what a waste of time.
I wonder how long it took Albert Camus to write The Stranger; it was probably longer than it would take ChatGPT to summarize it for me. Camus could’ve just sent ChatGPT a prompt like “Write me a book about a guy who gets executed.” That would’ve saved him so much time. That’s all that happened in the book anyway. Generative AI was a thing in the 1940s right? Hey, Chat! Were you readily available in 1942? Short answer: nope. I didn’t exist in 1942. Man, poor Camus, he had to, like, sit and actually think about the plot of a novel. It’s so much easier now that we can all generate the same plot, assuming we all paste in the same prompt. We can all be Camus if we request that Chat generates our fresh, new, awesome ripoff of someone else’s work and then translates it into French for us. None of us need Duolingo if ChatGPT can French-ify our AI-generated work.
Overall, I humbly recommend we paste all of our creativity and individuality into ChatGPT so that it can make it just like everyone else’s. Conformity is key, really. I don’t need to think critically about anything anyway; I’ll just ask ChatGPT how to vote in the next election. Why would I spend time doing my own research and considering my options if I can just take advice from generative AI?
Welcome to The Shield‘s annual satire section. Writers use satire to improve a problem in society. Sometimes readers misunderstand the satire as they do not recognize the hyperbole, irony, rhetorical questions, sarcasm, and understatements. Readers may mistake the satirical solution for the actual solution that the writer proposes. The ideas in these satire stories do not necessarily represent the opinions of The Shield or Westmont. If one is confused about satire, please contact a friendly neighborhood English teacher.