A while back I was bored out of my mind, so on a whim I decided to play a roleplay game with ChatGPT. The kind where I have it play, you know… a little-sister type who keeps calling me “onii-chan,” hopelessly in love with me on the inside but acting all cold on the surface — a veteran tsundere, that push-and-pull, playing-hard-to-get kind of conversation. People online have already said you can chat about all sorts of lewd stuff with ChatGPT, as long as you feed it enough preconditions and declarations first. That’s obviously no obstacle for me, so I charged right in. Getting ChatGPT to accept the identity I gave it wasn’t hard, and soon we were deep in conversation. It’s just that the conversation felt… really weird.

One of the hottest topics lately is AI. ChatGPT blowing up again at the start of this year left the masses stunned—“it’s already this powerful?"—and also a little scared. “If computers keep getting this strong, it’s only a matter of time before they replace us, right?” Along with that fear comes every sci-fi plot about machines ruling humanity, as if in a few years we’ll all be jacking cables into the backs of our heads and entering a metaverse called the matrix, while our bodies form a resistance underground against the mighty robots. The crisis always arrives fast and sudden. But is that really how it goes?

There are all kinds of “what if I could go back to school again” hypotheticals online, and plenty of discussions built on top of them. Not that I haven’t had the same thought. I’ve talked about the possibility with friends too. In high school I was a waste of space. Every exam I barely scraped a pass, teetering on the edge of the bottom of the year, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I just kept going out to find internet cafes, or hitting up relatives’ places, or classmates’ houses that had a PC, dicking around on forums to see what was playable. I think I even saved up and bought a Pocket PC, kept refreshing the same few forums, and ended up a moderator on one of them. Young me was pretty garbage at studying, honestly. Chinese I learned by reading newspapers; English I learned by playing games. Math wasn’t that I didn’t get it — the teacher just never taught you how to derive anything. He’d shove the process at you, tell you to memorize it, and next time you see this kind of problem, do it like this. Physics I thought I knew, but the problems always came out wrong somehow. Chemistry I had zero interest in. My biology teacher looked at me like I was brain-damaged. Sometimes at night, when I’m studying Japanese and all sorts of stuff, I sigh at how good the internet is now. Never mind whether you can use Google — even if you hit a problem, you can search Quora and find plenty of people explaining the principle in plain terms. Back in my high school days, even getting online was a pain in the ass. And even though I could use Google freely back then, I couldn’t search up anything, because Chinese resources were far too scarce and my English wasn’t good enough yet. So to me the internet now is more like a “library” — quickly look up whatever knowledge you need. You don’t even need a textbook’s explanation. With some judgment, you can learn basically anything through the internet. And now I’m always sighing that I don’t have enough time to study, work is full of bullshit, and when I try to read a book my attention gets shredded by the internet after a while. If I could be sent back to school to study, I’d definitely be way more goated than the waste of space I used to be. So this “what if” — I’ve argued it with people. “You know what, if you put me back in school now to study, I’d absolutely kill it.” Haozhi across from me drained his beer after hearing my bragging. “Bullshit!” He dropped those two words… And left me sitting there dumbfounded. ………………