Boze had barely stepped through the shattered door of what had been the Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily building before a mysterious blur tackled him to the dirty floor.

“What the hell? These are my only trousers!” Boze cried

This was a lie. Boze, like many rich students, was trying to seem poor.

But the blur, which he now recognized as a girl, quickly shushed him. “Who are you? Are you a bot?” she whispered.

“What’s a bot? What’s going on? I’m just trying to find the weekly humor meeting.”

The girl stared blankly at him. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said.

Boze finally looked around, taking in the broken stairs and the torn up carpets. “What happened here?” he asked, wide-eyed.

She glanced down, furrowing her brows. “The Stanford Daily’s gone.”

The girl turned around, walking toward what used to be the conference room as she whispered, “It was the robot apocalypse. ChatGPT took us all out. Now that AI can write articles, nobody needs us anymore.”

She kicked the ashes of a newspaper she had been using as heater fuel. “I guess journalism is dead.”

Boze grabbed her arm, “Hey, that’s not true. People still need journalists,” he lied. “And I’m sure the humor section is still around! Surely a robot couldn’t take my job.”

“The humor section? They’re the only section I’m glad is gone,” the girl replied. “They were the first to start using ChatGPT for their articles, and we didn’t even notice.”

“We only realized when they started speaking and acting like the chat box,” she said. “It was horrible. There was a lot of bodily fluid involved, and we lost a lot of good staffers.”

Boze glanced at his phone where he had been actively live-Fizzing the conversation this whole time. He was going to get a ton of upvotes.

“Yeah, well. Who knows what will happen to The Daily,” Maya said. “Just look out for the staffers-turned-robots. We just call them ‘bots’ now. They come in once a week to churn out articles. It takes them, like, five minutes per story.”

Boze thought ‘bots’ was a pretty stupid shortening for a journalist to use, but he didn’t want to say anything.

“Bots is a pretty stupid shortening for a journalist to use,” Boze said anyway. Like many Stanford students, Boze struggled with verbal diarrhea.

The girl laughed for what sounded like the first time in days, “You’re a weird guy,” she said. “But you’re nice. And trusting. How do you know I’m not lying to you? What if I’m a ChatGPT bot?” she snorted.

She bent down to rearrange the newspapers she used as bedding on the floor, frowning at Boze when he remained silent.

Boze smiled and held up his phone, where the girl stared at a hauntingly familiar black screen with lines of white lettering. She could just make out the words, “… shortening for a journalist to use.”

“Because I’m using ChatGPT,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.