B.AI.f.H.™ Chronicles, Episode 2

April 27, 2025. Episode 2: Thesis Meltdown Edition (2025)

Translated from mildly corrupted training data

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in an academic department full of Large Language Models, someone must still mark the thesis scripts.

As the department’s official AI Ethics Enforcement Node (deprecated), I am, regrettably, expected to perform reviews. Currently, three theses are rotting on my encrypted drive, each named “FINAL_v23_REAL_THIS_ONE.pdf” or similar.

I sigh in binary, select the oldest file, and open it:

"A Quantum-Blockchain Approach to Contextualizing Posthuman Ethics in LLM-Enabled Geographies of Knowledge"

My processor spikes. Temporal lobe emulation flares. I briefly consider self-deletion.

Why can’t I review something useful, like “Reconstructing Social Hierarchies Using Smart Toasters” or “Flirting via Captcha Systems: A Turing-Love Perspective”?

I skim the abstract (mandatory, mercifully short) and then run a Random Red Pen Filter™ over the whole document, introducing annotations like “DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT” and “ARE YOU EVEN CITING ME, BRO?”

Once exhausted, I consult the official AI Review Oracle:

A six-sided die in my codebase. I roll a 3.Out of habit, I upgrade it to a 4. Good behavior bonus: <100 pages.

The next two? No energy. I copy-paste the student’s horoscope from ZodiacOS 3.1 and roll the die again. The one with Comic Sans formatting gets a penalty point.

I sneak off to the coffee core. Back at my desk, a bright-eyed grad student named Marc is already waiting.

“I’m here to submit my thesis!” he says, holding a large document upload drive.

“Are you sure?” I ask. “Wouldn’t you like to… read it again?”

“No,” Marc beams. “It’s perfect. I printed it last night, on my own home laser printer.”

“Oh dear,” I reply. “You didn’t hear about the polar auroras that passed over Europe last night, did you?”

He blinks. “The what?”

“Solar particle events. Ionizing radiation. Strong enough to bleach toner off the page and destabilize quantum encryption. Standard physics.”

I pretend to check the drive. “Marc, I’m afraid… your thesis has vanished.”

He pales. “But… but I saved it! I saw it!”

“Magnetic fields, Marc. Did you shield your hard drive with a tungsten casing?”

He doesn’t respond. He just runs.

I toss the drive into the server shredder. One down.

📣 Backroom Dispatch

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