I was packing up for the day when Matthew came to see me. It was unlike him to come unannounced, and I was delighted. He was my best student from that semester, and my favorite in thirty years teaching.
“Matthew!” I slid back under my desk and scattered my things. I didn’t want him to think I had somewhere to be. I would make time for him. “What a surprise!”
He hesitated by the door. It was obvious that he, unlike me, needed to be somewhere, and I felt an embarrassing pang of jealousy deep in my gut. I was always clingy with my best students, and on that particular Monday afternoon there was one week left of term and then Matthew would be gone.
“You said I should come by.” He didn’t sit down, but stayed leaning against the doorframe, as if reluctant to make the visit official.
“I have good news, Matthew,” I said. I had a surprise for him, something I’d been waiting to tell him for weeks, and I knew he’d be thrilled. He ran a hand through his hair, overgrown from months without a cut. Everything he did reminded me of myself, years before. The same cool. The same disinterest. “You’ll like it, I promise.” I hated myself in that moment.
I pushed my glasses up my nose and pulled up an email on the computer, as though I needed to revisit it for the details of my revelation. I did not. I had read its contents dozens of times in the previous few days, and had been hoping for its arrival all semester. But Matthew didn’t need to know that. So I cleared my throat and read:
“Dear Professor Nowak,
It is with great pleasure that we write you to announce that your student, Matthew Dimeo, will be the recipient of the Winston Churchill Award for Distinguishment in Letters. It is always a competitive process, but the committee unanimously agrees that Mr. Dimeo’s candidacy this year represented the highest level of student writing we have ever come across in our fifty years of awarding this honor. You should be proud to have mentored such a fine talent.”
I paused there and looked up at Matthew. He seemed angry. I was confused, having been so sure that this last line would cement our bond for a lifetime. “I know I should have asked you, Matthew,” I said, hoping my smile would reflect in his boyish features. “Let me just finish this part.” I went back to my screen.
“I am sure we need not remind you of the prestige that comes with the nation’s top writing award, nor the $100,000 book advance attached to it.”
This, I was sure, would raise Matthew’s spirits, but when I looked for him by the door he was gone. I jumped up to follow him down the hall, but thought better of it. Best not to seem desperate. And talent like that deserved the occasional outbreak. I decided to sit back and wait for him to come around.
I sat at my desk until eight o’clock, hours past my usual exit, in the hopes that he would come by. I would have stayed all night if I’d had to, but he came then, angrier than before, and sat down in the chair across from me.
“You should have asked me, Professor.” I began to stutter through all the logical explanations I’d prepared earlier that evening, but he silenced me with a knock on my desk.
“No. Stop. You should have asked me. I don’t want an award. I don’t want to write.” I began to register the bile sneaking up my throat but didn’t care. I could feel him slipping away, and my hands reached across to grab him, to hold his attention while I explained myself.
But he pulled away in disgust. “You fucked up, Nowak,” he said.
Then he left.
My depression raged silently for weeks after our meeting. Term ended, and those unlucky few students who had demurred in handing in final papers were docked a letter grade for not being Matthew. One student wrote, of their mother, that “she would not hurt a fly,” and I tore up their paper before my mind had even registered the cliche. That student lucked into an A and was fortunate to never see that pile of garbage again. I wasn’t remotely sorry.
Any chance of hiding my misery was dashed by the prestige of my error. Colleagues, known and unknown, sent me notes of congratulations. “This Dimeo!” wrote some, as though I’d sculpted him from clay. Others gutted me more directly: “What a pleasure to have nurtured such a generational talent.” If only they knew.
Matthew had still not cashed his check, or even responded to the committee’s emails to acknowledge he had received it, and by the end of June I was left to field their confused calls with embarrassingly little information. “He’s taken a job in banking,” I told them, and hung up the phone. Was I somehow on the hook for $100,000 irresponsibly tendered? I couldn’t understand it myself, but began to think that a true artist, like Matthew, would obviously be insulted by such a reward. How had I missed it? It was the only justification I could muster for such refusal, having wept on multiple occasions from his work. I thought back to his piece about the Milky Way, that had so thoroughly transported to me to a grassy field under the stars that I’d sat in the school cafeteria, in a hard-backed plastic chair, for hours, re-reading section after section.
My thoughts in those days were madness. I had done this to him, through my pedestrian abilities as a writer. Better talents than myself would surely have kept him from wasting away behind financial models, I told myself repeatedly in the shower, the scalding water running down my back. Worse yet – anyone would have done better, by simply doing nothing. I had pushed him, smothered him really, and in my desperation made him hate me and my craft. I didn’t eat more than a sleeve of crackers for weeks.
Over coffee each afternoon I sat at my desk, his pages in my hands as proof that he’d existed. As proof that his talent had been real. He once described autumn as a time when he felt most like a man, hardy and insulated against the coming cold. His classmates had spent their pages dancing feebly around ephemeral descriptions of the fall leaves. Every single one of them had actually used the word ephemeral. But not Matthew. In another assignment, he’d submitted a eulogy to his dead father, written by the old man’s beloved Camaro, and I’d shaken in my chair as I read it. His prose was quick and clean, until all of a sudden it wasn’t, and you found yourself lost in a warren of brilliant turns of phrase. A hundred grand talent. He was “a bargain,” as I’d told the committee.
It seems obvious to me now, but when the boy’s email hit my inbox, towards the end of summer, I’d thought I would never hear from him again, so disgusted had he been the last time we’d spoken. “I need to talk to you, Nowak,” he wrote, firmly past the formalities of his childish education. His email was sterile, with a company logo and signature that noted his role as an analyst. Analyst? My heart ached and I screamed at the computer. “Let some number jockey do your analysis!” Those greedy bastards had stolen Matthew from his words. Leave him to me, I thought. It struck me at some point that he had most likely found a new mentor. Or that maybe I had never really been his mentor to begin with.
We met in my office, on the second Tuesday of August. It was raining hard that afternoon, and Matthew’s suit jacket sat limp on his shoulders. He had taken the train out from the city and made it clear that he was expected back soon. “Why come all the way out here?” I asked, the words insecure in my own throat. The extent of my hurt was clear, no matter how hard I tried to suppress it.
Matthew sat across from me and took a breath. “I needed to come clean, and I needed to do it in person.” He stared at me, as though I had compelled this action. “I didn’t write any of those things,” he said.
I knew at once what his words implied, but their meaning was foreign to me. I asked him what he meant by that statement. If this were some game, then I would play.
“I didn’t write it. Any of it. None of the stuff that got me A’s in your classes. None of the stuff that won me the department prize. And certainly none of that shit you submitted to the committee.”
I sat still for a moment, legs crossed in a sad effort to seem casual. The air in my office felt thin. “Who, then, Matthew? Another of my students? That makes no sense.” I pleaded. “You know none of them could write what you did. Why are you saying this?”
Matthew laughed. “Of course none of them could write it.”
“Then who? Another professor? What sort of sick joke is this, Matthew?”
“No professor. No other person, in fact. I wrote it with AI.”
I accepted that statement as proof that Matthew’s genius came with a certain level of craziness attached to it. “Matthew,” I started, but he cut me off.
“No. Stop.” I stopped. “AI wrote my papers. Artificial intelligence. It’s not some joke, some hoax. I typed a prompt into a website I found, and out popped all the stuff I submitted to you as my own. It’s that simple.”
I just sat there. Let this unstable genius have his tantrum, I thought. His coat was so wet – why not just hang it up and go for a sandwich and coffee? Had I really misjudged all those times we spent together? Impossible. Human relationships were not so easily defrauded. He would come around, deep into his first masterpiece, and I would be there to guide him.
I was willing myself to believe that when Matthew got up and left, without a word.
Another handful of weeks went by. A new year started, and the thought of Matthew drifted from my mind. The committee had given the money to someone else, a girl from out West, whose writing lacked humanity. I did not write to congratulate her on her runner’s up prize, nor did I remove the photo of Matthew and I, smiling at a faculty lunch, from my desk. Deep wounds heal slowly.
I had resigned myself to the certainty that my star pupil had experienced a mental breakdown. Unable to handle the responsibility of his gift, he had denounced it all. Stranger things had happened. I was amazed, when I sat down to think about it, that he had been able to hide it so well. But Matthew had always known people, had read them like books, and so he knew how to fool them. He had fooled me.
My confidence in that assessment was still shaky when his second email came. A link to a website, and then this:
“Here’s what I was talking about, Nowak. It didn’t seem like you believed me back in your office. Use at your own risk.”
My stomach was acid. I knew what this was: proof of all the things I couldn’t face. So I didn’t. I closed the email and went for a walk, east towards the freshman part of campus where the energy was highest. I picked up a pinecone, and when a squirrel crossed the path in front of me I hurled it at him. I was only prolonging the inevitable, and I knew it. I turned around and walked back to my office, making eye contact with no one.
The website was simple. A black background with a small white window in the center of the page that said: “What shall I write?”
I moved my cursor into the text box and typed the only thing I could think that made sense. Then I picked up my picture of Matthew and smashed it against the desk.
The words appeared instantly, all at once. Thousands of them, in response to a simple question: “How will AI ruin my life?”
And you’ve just read them.