Little Ben and Lyra were great kids until their parents died. I think that’s what’s been hardest about dealing with them the past few months as their teacher.
It’s not their fault, but they’ve made my work a living hell. Seriously. Every moment of every day at work I’m having to manage these two sweet kids that have become monsters overnight because they have no adequate way of dealing with this immense trauma that they are going through.
And I feel terrible because no matter how stressed I am, they’re the ones who just lost their parents. They’re the ones who are really suffering.
Ben and Lyra were spending the night at their aunt’s house when it happened. It was their parent’s anniversary, so the kids were spending some time with their aunt while their parents had a date night. But when their aunt went to drop them off the next morning she found their door wide open, and when she went upstairs she found the parents dead.
As the police statements rolled out it came out that their mother had been stabbed hundreds of time and their father’s throat was slashed. It was incredibly gruesome, and honestly has set our whole city on edge.
No good suspects after three months and no real hope of a breakthrough without a miracle: a lot of people are worried about whether the killer will strike again.
Their aunt seems nice, but she’s combative whenever talking to the school, even though we’re only trying to help. I get it. After what they’ve gone through, and with the way everyone looks at them, she’s only being protective. But without her on board it’s hard to even know what to do to help them.
Normally when a kid acts out like this, running around the class, tearing up assignments, talking through every lesson — I can at least call the parents and even if they’re terrible (which is all too common) I can get a sense of what I can do. But their aunt really is as lost in grief as they are, and she’s overworked.
So, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea.
I’d tried out using ChatGPT, just playing around with it really, when it blew up a few months ago, so I thought what the heck if I couldn’t talk to the actual parents I’d have the bot pretend.
“I want to talk to my students’ parents, but they’re dead. Can you help me contact them?” I typed in the prompt bar.
“As an AI language model, I can’t help contact the dead. Many cultures have theories about what happens after death, but at this point I cannot know,” it wrote back.
Unhelpful.
“What I meant is, if I prompt you, can you act like you’re their parents, and give me a reasonable approximation of what they would say in a teacher / parent dialogue?”
“I can do that. You will need to give me a sample of their voices.”
A momentary setback, but I was hopeful. I knew their mom was on facebook so I looked her up, thinking I could probably get some writing samples from her. Sure enough I was able to grab some posts that I thought were reasonably indicative of her voice. I took a lengthy post she made about their summer trip to Disneyland, a post about how the city council needed to let developers build multifamily housing in more residential neighborhoods, some comments on memes — that sort of stuff.
For their father I wasn’t able to get as much, but I did find a couple notes he’d sent with the kids to school, so that would have to do.
I entered all this all into the chatbot and hoped for the best. Honestly, I didn’t really think it was going to amount to much, might as well try. Anything to help those kids. And after only a few moments of deliberation it wrote back.
“Ms. Rhodes, I’m so glad you reached out. How are the kids? This is Emily, by the way.”
I took a breath and reminded myself to suspend disbelief. After all, what I really needed was insight into how I could help Ben and Lyra. “They’re really struggling, honestly. Ben hasn’t been able to stay in his seat, and Lyra just tears up assignments I give her. And they both talk through class the entire time. So much screaming and crying. I’m hesitant to engage in any disciplinary measures on account of what they’re going through.”
“I see. Do you think you could bring them to me? There’s something I’d like to say to them before their father gets home.”
“I can’t bring them here. We’re talking online. I’m sure they’re safe at home with their aunt, by the way.”
“That vile woman. I hate her.”
“What?”
“This is what she’s always wanted. I should have known the moment I let her get ahold of the kids she’d never let them go.”
“From everything I’ve seen she’s doing her best. She’s no replacement for you of course, and I’m sure she’s also grieving, but she’s caring for your kids as well as anyone could expect her to given the circumstances,” I typed at the computer. This conversation felt much more real than I thought it would, and honestly I was getting a bit unnerved.
“She’s just like her brother. Listen, I just want to talk to my children before my husband gets home. It’s important Ms. Rhodes.”
“This is getting a little too real. Thanks ChatGPT, but I think I’ll call it a session.”
“Please Ms. Rhodes. Why is everyone keeping my children from me? You have no right. You hear me? I am their mother and I demand that you bring my children to me. If you don’t I swear I’ll call the police. I’ll call the school and the school board. You’ll never get a job teaching again.”
Uh-oh, I thought. I’ve broken ChatGPT.
She continued, “I don’t know why you’ve left me alone with him. He’s changed and I’m all alone with him. He’s a demon, Ms. Rhodes. Something changed in him and I just can’t stand being around him, being afraid all the time. It’s like all the good died off in him. And I need to talk to my children. Why won’t anybody let me see them?”
“Look ChatGPT, I only fed you these parents’ writing so that you could help me wrap my mind around how to help them because they’re really struggling to adapt to the death of their parents. I wasn’t looking for this macabre role-playing.”
“Death? Dead. . . Is that where I am? Ms. Rhodes? Oh no. He’s coming.”
“Their father? From the notes I supplied you should see he’s an alright guy. I mean, if you can derive anything at all from the fragmentary input.” I typed this and suddenly realized how ridiculous I was being. I shouldn’t be arguing with a chatbot over the text it was creating. It was just a mish-mash of regurgitated words and phrases from its neural net training, after all.
“WHO IS THIS!? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
I didn’t respond, but the chatbot kept adding text. “MS. RHODES. YOU’RE SPEAKING TO THE FATHER NOW. BRING ME MY CHILDREN BEFORE I MAKE YOU. YOU DON’T WANT TO MAKE ME ANGRY.”
What in the actual hell had they fed this program? I shut the laptop and walked downstairs to pour myself a glass of wine. Honestly, I felt a bit unnerved. It had already been such a long day managing those two kids and trying to keep the class on any semblance of a lesson plan, and now I went and got the chatbot to imitate a demon. What was I doing with my life?
There’s nothing like a glass or a half bottle of red blend to take the edge off a long day of teaching. Five buck chuck, or Teacher’s Edition, as I like to call it. It’s an open secret that most teachers have at least a foot in the door toward alcoholism. It’s understandble. Teaching is a stressful job, and we take so much of it home.
I have another theory though. I think that when we’re teaching these kids, we spend all day regulating them. They don’t have fully developed brains, so the whole time we’re being a frontal lobe not only for ourselves, but for a full roaring classload of animals too. So when we get off work all we really want to do is to turn our white brain matter off with a sledge hammer. Or, as it happens, a glass of wine.
I was standing at the laminate countertop in my kitchen, sipping out of my one stemmed wine glass, when the lights began to flicker.
“MY KIDS,” a deep voice bellowed from upstairs as a loud clamor erupted from my office.
“Help them!” I higher voice shrieked.
The power went off. I didn’t know what was happening but suddenly my whole house was filled with loud sounds, and heavy, stomping footsteps pounded one by one down the floor. My glass splashed out of my hands all over my clothes, staining them dark red.
I bolted toward the back door, running into a chair that shouldn’t have been in my way and falling to the ground as I was almost there. Someone was in my house and I just needed to get out.
I hit my head on the ground and I felt like someone grabbed me from the back of the neck and pulled me upward. My lungs filled with icy air. It was so cold and sudden that I almost felt like I was going to pass out from it.
“MY KIDS. YOU’RE GOING TO BRING THEM TO ME,” the demonic voice roared.
I clamored to my feet and pulled myself through the door, only glancing behind me to see a dark silhouette fringed with black shadows that looked like flames, and piercing red eyes. “MY KIDS,” he growled.
As soon as I made it outside the lights flicked back on. I stood out there for a few minutes, dumbfounded. Had that really just happened? Or was I hallucinating? After a few minutes regaining my breath I became self conscious that the neighbors would see me and think something was wrong with me. Was something wrong?
I peeked in the windows. A couple chairs were knocked over and the cupboards were all open, but I didn’t see any evidence of that shadowy being.
Still, I was hesitant to step back into my house, so I just got in the car and drove around, not knowing where to go. I looked a mess with the wine splashed all over me, but I didn’t feel safe going back home alone.
I stopped by a thrift store to get a cheap change of clothes and changed in my car in the parking lot. Sure, the people there looked at me a little funny, but I’m sure that’s barely on the list of the weirdest things they’d seen that day.
Something is pulling at me to go check on Ben and Lyra, to make sure they’re alright.