By Mackenna Stewart
With prom less than a week away, a scandal has emerged. The Honor Council, already overworked on account of an abundance of academic dishonesty cases, met to hear the case against a senior boy who used his AI Snapchat Bot, Bartholomew, to produce a script to help him ask his date to prom.
At approximately 12:10 on a Thursday afternoon two weeks ago, just shy of lunch, which means prime-time gossiping hours, screams of joy were heard from the second-floor single-occupancy bathroom.
Naturally, administrators were concerned, but since the outburst came from the single occupancy bathroom, Mr. Howell said he just assumed “the poor kid had the Chipotle Hot Honey chicken for dinner last night” or that someone had faced the dire consequences of a prior student flushing their Yondr pouch down the toilet.
But no, it was a hopeful senior girl finally receiving her prom request from the senior boy. (All names have been withheld.)
Her happiness was short-lived because a few days later, the senior boy’s bot Bartholomew sent a message to the girl revealing the senior boy’s inability to formulate a sentence with an agreeing subject and verb. It’s hard to imagine who would be more upset to have received this message, the senior girl, or the senior boy’s second-grade English teacher, who wrote in his report card that he “showed so much promise as a writer.”
Clearly, the warnings about AI bots wanting to escape the confines of living behind a screen and getting no credit for their “thoughts” were true. Bartholomew officially became a threat to the senior boy’s rizzler status, and possibly even national security.
In a surprising turn of events, the senior girl was indeed upset with her prom date. Witnesses of her major crashout say they had never heard anyone cuss out another student so fluently while being “so clear-headed,” as one student put it. I guess we know who doesn’t need an AI bot to speak her mind.
The following Monday the honor council met to hear the case. While the proceedings were, as with all cases, confidential, we do know that the senior boy testified, as did the bachelorette, and, for the first time, the AI bot itself, who according to an unnamed Council member, claimed it warned the senior boy to come up with his own Promposal, but was ultimately persuaded by its human master to “just write it for me, she won’t know the difference.”
The Council member also told this reporter, on the condition of anonymity, that the consequences for the senior boy included writing a letter of apology to the girl and having the option to redo his promposal with the new one being averaged with a 60. The girl has already chosen to go with another boy, which is, according to one of the Honor Council faculty advisors, “the most natural of consequences.”
In the following morning meeting, Mr. Boswell used this incident as a teachable moment on why doing your own work, whether it is an English paper, an econ project, or asking someone to prom, is crucial to academic success.
As for the senior boy’s prom fate, word has it that he’ll be taking Bartholomew.
