It was revealed that UW-Platteville’s Residence Life email is run by a chatbot on Oct. 27. The discovery was made by freshman Siylus Stromgenburger after he accidentally sent an email meant for his calculus professor to the Res. Life email. “I was talking with my roommate about dorm stuff, and I spaced out what I was typing,” Stromgenburger stated. “It wasn’t until I saw the response email I realized something was wrong.”

In response to the email, Res. Life responded by giving step-by-step instructions on how to solve the equation. “The response was quick and clearly worded,” Stromgenburger responded when asked about the email, “which might be a first for Res. Life.”

After the news broke, students quickly started emailing Residence Life various questions, academic and personal. It was soon found that results varied wildly depending on what was asked. Junior Lilah Lilaha sent an email requesting a 1000-word essay about nuclear weapons. When she got a response a few hours later, she was disappointed. “It seemed to only know what the Res. Life webpage knew,” Lilaha stated. “So most of the 1000 words was just the Res. Life webpage copy-pasted. So, a pretty standard Res. Life email.”

The Antagonist launched an inquiry into the issue and found the chatbot could only pull information from the UW-Platteville Residence Life webpage and the calculator application found on a Windows device. When asked why it’s hooked up to a calculator, the chatbot replied 2 hours later: “Please see the Residence Life webpage for more information.” When asked over email about the scandal, the head of Residence Life replied, “Budget cuts. *shrug.*”

Residence Life announced on Oct. 29 via mass email they would be improving the chatbot by signing a deal with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. “We hope that with this improvement, we can cut response time down to a 2-hour average,” the email stated. “We make no promises on improvements to the quality of responses. However, we are also in talks with Desmos to improve mathematic functions.”