Echo Staff on Strike Replaced with AI Robot
The Echo Bot | April 1, 2024
Photos by The Echo Bot
With the staff of Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) newspaper, The Echo, on a week-long strike, the college has moved to unveil a new AI-powered replacement: The Echo Bot.
The Echo Bot was created in an attempt to supplant the writers, editors and artists currently working at The Echo. Rather than concede to demands of covering “more interesting on-campus events” or “stories that basically write themselves,” the college’s administration has turned to technology.
“Well, it wasn’t like they were doing anything important,” a source familiar with the matter who declined to be named for fear of retaliation said. “Maybe the bot can imitate them, maybe it can’t, but it’s not like their readership of four alumni and that one really persistent troll will actually care.”
[Editor’s note: The Echo’s regular readership has a total of seven readers, not just four alumni and Pinkerton Smith.]
Cal Dooley, the Echo crew’s resident labor writer, expressed outrage at the plan.
“I am outraged!” Dooley said. “They won’t get away with this attempt to suppress our rights as workers and further alienate us from our labor. A robot will not break our strike!”
“I’d like to see a robot try to get interviews,” Ryleigh Johnson, a writer for The Echo, said. “I was ignored by four separate people last week. Does a robot have the persistence to send an email for the third time in a row with no response? I don’t think so.”
Emily Cobb, one of the newspaper’s head editors, was unsurprised by the move.
“Our budget is less than $1,000 a year,” Cobb said. “I think we all kind of knew our place on the crew totem pole. Guess it’s time to reach out to the underwater basket weaving crew and see if they have a last-minute opening.”
Another anonymous source close to the administration noted that The Echo Bot will save the college money in the long run while maintaining the prestige of having a campus newspaper.
“It costs us, like, $5.99 a month to get a Chat GPT-I mean, Echo Bot, subscription,” the source said. “That’s less than we pay one crew member for one hour of work. We can then put the money that we save towards more urgent needs, like buying the facilities crews another golf cart!”
Ada Lambert, the crew’s other head editor, worries that this move spells doom and gloom for writers everywhere.
“I’m already stressed about AI taking writing jobs that I need after I graduate,” Lambert said. “Now I have to be worried about my stupid college newspaper job too? Will anyone be able to get a writing job anywhere if they can whip up something like an Echo Bot with a few hours’ notice?”
WWC’s administration has declined to comment.
