By KEVIN KAUMANS
Entertainment Editor
Welcome back my friends. Come closer, let me get a better look at you. Aw, come on, don’t be shy now. I just want to see how you all changed over the Summer. Ah, Laila, still as beautiful as ever I see. Matt, I love what you did with your hair. And Zack, well……I see that you’re still here at Northwestern.
Tell me, how was your guys’ summer? It’s alright, you can raise your hand. This is a judgement-free zone. Oh? You finished your thesis? Well done Kara, I’m so proud of you!
As for me, I am proud to announce that I have recently been promoted at our beloved newspaper. Yes, you all heard that right, I have officially been crowned as the new entertainment editor at Northwestern!
Now, now, you can all stop clapping. Sure, I may now be what the media industry calls a “real journalist” now that I’m an editor and expect all students to refer to me as “your greatness” to honor my utmost unimportance, but I can assure you that I’m still a normal guy like the rest of you.
In all seriousness though, I have had a lot of time to think over these past four months without the pressures of being an English literature major breathing down my neck.
I swear, people will swear up and down that non-stem majors are the easiest thing in the world until they have to stay up to the crack of midnight to write a thousand-word essay on how “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Hemingway is an allegory for female empowerment and the Great Emu War of 1932, but I digress.
You see, I’ve been listening to a lot of Reddit youtubers lately. For those of you who are unaware, Reddit youtubers are people who have given up on life and decided to stick to the laziest form of content creation (second only to reaction channels that is) in order to make just enough money to convince their mom not to kick them out of the basement.
Basically, these fine men and women go onto multiple Reddit forms, pick the most interesting story they can find — whether it’d be someone finding out their partner is cheating on them or how an entitled woman at their retail job demanded free goods and services –, and then they read the story word for word.
Sure, some of them might actually put in some effort once in a while and give the original poster (or, as the internet refers to them, OP) some advice for their situation. But more often than not, the most these people do is use AI to read the story and post it online without giving any credit to the person who made their content farm in the first place.
But what if I were to tell you that it gets even lazier? What if I were to tell you that, thanks to the technological advances made in the AI industry, these “influencers” found a way to generate twenty-to-thirty minutes worth of content with a simple writing prompt?
You see, since late 2022, chat bots and generative storytelling have grown immensely popular with the public. I, myself, remember discovering websites like “Character AI”, “Janitor AI”, and “Talkie AI” that had gained millions of members who were exultant that they could finally be able to talk to their favorite fictional character.
I remember when I would spend hours on “ChatGPT” creating the most silly, absurd stories that never failed to entertain me. “But what does this have to do with AI youtubers?” I hear you ask. Well, let me explain.
Over the past two years, I have come across multitudes of Reddit channels that have these out-of-pocket titles like “Entitled Parents Try To Steal My House To Give It To My Golden Child Sibling, So I Ruined Them And Let Them Go Homeless.”, or “My Sister Kicked My Daughter, Stole My Life Savings, And Shot My Pregnant Wife. My Parents Defended Her. Two Months Later, I Found Them At My House Begging For Forgiveness After I Destroyed Their Lives.”
Needless to say, it did not take me long to figure out these stories were fake. To this day, I only listen to these types of AI-generated stories for three reasons: One, because it gives me background noise while I work on my projects.
Two, it helps prove my theory that humans will always be able to write better stories than AI ever could.
Three, these videos teach me how to tell if a story was written by an AI bot or not, knowledge that I will now pass on to you, fellow reader.
The first way to tell if a reddit story was written by an AI is to pay close attention to the beginning. The OP is almost always the so-called “disappointment” child when in reality, they just so happened to own the most successful construction business or mechanic shop in the city (Note: If the OP is a female, then it will sometimes be something like a tech company).
The “golden” child is either the OP’s brother who is a social media influencer with ten followers who does nothing but party and play video games, or their sister who is a stereotypical mean girl that spends all her money on makeup and still lives with their parents. Sometimes, the AI will give them a fiancé that is either a pick-me girl or a self-proclaimed entrepreneur.
Speaking of the parents, the mom is usually a dollar store Livia Soprano that cares about the family’s image. The dad, on the other hand, is a “Temu” version of an angry sitcom dad with none of the self-awareness.
The story will often have them be neglectful if not outright abusive, and will always have them berate OP for their dreams and hobbies. When they finally become a successful millionaire, OP’s parents always demand either money, their house, or a kidney if the AI is feeling creative.
These stories will also have a grandparent, uncle, or best friend that is always the straight man in the situation who calls the rest of OP’s family out for their cartoonishly level of entitlement. A few of them will have the grandparent be a billionaire who leaves all of the money to OP.
But most of the time, these stories end with OP exposing the family for their favoritism, taking them to court, and having the family end up broke and living in a one-room apartment in Detroit or in East South Sudan.
Alright, I think I have rambled on long enough, but you get the point. It is no question that AI does a lot of good for humanity. Rest assured, I am by no means writing this to call for a human revolt against your Siri or Alexis. I just want to point out how easy it is nowadays for the most slothful in our society to create and produce while those who are genuinely creative and talented struggle to follow their dreams in today’s economy.
But who knows, maybe this is the future of the human race: To generate slop for the attention-deficient youth while we lock all true art away in the deepest bowels of our archives to collect dust, and I’m just a bitter boomer stuck in a twenty-year-old, autistic man who still collects “Pokémon” cards, body.