Tim Elder ‘28
Wary of which bots to associate with…
All Holy Cross students alike know what it’s like to deal with the pain of deleting and avoiding the many GroupMe bots from their various club group chats. Early on, these bots were easy to spot from their robotic tone in their messages, but as of late, they seem to be getting smarter and smarter. The bots have now added profile pictures and changed their names from “User68459493” to a more human name, like John or something. Due to these changes, bots have become harder to remove. Since the bots imitate real students better, club leaders hesitate to remove them. This is likely less out of uncertainty about the bot and more out of reluctance to admit they don’t actually know everyone in their own club and then accidentally remove a real person.
This past week, tragedy struck, and a student actually accepted a message from one of these many bots. This student, who is definitely real and not made up, prefers to remain anonymous out of respect for their own privacy.
It started out as an innocent back-and-forth chat, the student says. They say this bot was a part of the group chat for their “Real Students Club” here on campus, so they didn’t see any harm in replying to the chats. The bot went by John Smith, which, to the student, felt “so real.” Next thing the student knows, they were replying to chats about free laptops, which then proceeded to the exchange of their grandmother’s bank information. What went from a student seemingly making a new friend to now their grandmother having to sell her giant pumpkin farm to cover all of the funds that were liquidated from the account.
The student is still adamant that the feelings exchanged in those chats were real, but the only reality is that there is some guy in his mom’s basement sitting on stacks of giant pumpkin farm money.
Featured image courtesy of Google Play
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