Atrophy: A novella about AI eroding a student's mind
A student struggling with a programming assignment discovers ChatGPT has already produced a perfect solution. Instead of jealousy, he feels vertigo—realizing his hours of effort have been rendered optional by a tool that works flawlessly in seconds.
That’s the thing nobody warns you about.
Not that it will fail. That it won’t.
From chapter 1
I should go to sleep. I should submit the assignment and close the laptop and go to sleep.
Instead I google “longest increasing subsequence solution.” The first result is a Stack Overflow thread and the second result is a GeeksforGeeks page and the third result is something different.
It’s a link to a conversation. Someone pasted the assignment prompt into ChatGPT and the response is there. The full solution. Clean, commented, correct. With an explanation that’s better than the textbook.
It took me six hours to write twenty-three lines that mostly work. This thing produced forty lines of perfect code in four seconds.
I close the tab. Something is happening in my chest that I can’t name. It’s not jealousy — you can’t be jealous of a tool. It’s vertigo. I’ve been climbing stairs in the dark and someone turned on the light and there’s an elevator right next to the staircase. Same floor. And my legs are tired and the stairs suddenly look like a voluntary suffering the world has quietly made optional.
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