Room draw can be a stressful time for many students on campus. The uncertainty of where you will spend 30 whole weeks of your hopefully long and successful life can lead to a not-insignificant level of anxiety and worry. This is especially so considering the great range of living situations one can end up in, from a dank double in Musser, to a dank triple in Watson, to the perils of braving the Goodhue Tornado when one is just trying to get to their 1a at 6:00 a.m. and has a 10 mile uphill hike ahead of them (that is also uphill on the return journey).
This year, however, ResLife is dealing with quite the peculiar situation: a group of enterprising sophomores have been submitting pencil sketches of Eugster house under the office doors in the hopes of being able to “draw-in.” At first, ResLife was mostly impressed. The vivid renderings of every angle, every nook and cranny of the house, were some of the most impressive artistic works they had ever seen. Measurements were accurate, the sponges by the sink were just as grimy as they really are and the living room had that unmistakable slightly-too-darkness. The generational virtuosity that was undoubtedly present in whatever genius auteur had crafted these illustrations was certainly masterful. Soon, however, problems started to appear. First was the sheer volume of drawings being received, with nearly 200 being delivered every day. Second, and more worryingly, ResLife realized that, under a technicality in the Student Housing and Defenestration Policy, a leftover but still bureaucratically efficacious document from 1871, these students were indeed entitled to their draw house so long as they did not fall out of a window in the interceding time period.
How did the students figure this out? The Carletonian spoke to the group leader, a lacrosse player from New New England (just outside of Columbus, Ohio) named Bordeaux Smith, who told me that he got the idea after a lengthy conversation with Elon Musk’s right-wing AI chatbot, Grok, who suggested the gambit. Not only that, but Grok became operationally integral to the whole affair after Bordeaux lost a game of rock-paper-hammer, in which his hand was smashed multiple times with a hammer very hard. Having lost his ability to draw, Bordeaux had no choice but to use Grok to generate the images. This, as it turns out, would be the fatal flaw in his plan. When ResLife caught wind of this, they immediately called off the MI6 agent en-route to push Bordeaux out of Watson 4, and instead rejected the room draw on the grounds that his images had not, in fact, been “drawn,” but rather generated.
The case is currently under litigation in the state court of Minnesota, where Bordeaux is claiming that all Grok images are in fact made by under-paid data workers in the Philippines. Mr. Musk is expected to testify next week. The current residents of Eugster have also given a statement about how and why they provided Grok with such accurate and up-to-date images of their home, primarily claiming that they were motivated by the promise of free musical instruments.
Obviously this is all a huge catastrophe. One can hardly think of anything worse happening in our school’s history, save, perhaps, for when they rebuilt Willis hall. Carleton’s president, Ally B, has since stepped in to rectify the situation, saying, “Obviously this sort of behavior cannot be tolerated at our school,” before using the giant catapult that expels people from Carleton in order to expel them from Carleton. All four of them will be attending St. Olaf, where they landed, this fall.
