The rise of AI.. has inspired a lot of anxieties about machines replacing humans, but one amazing kid in Berkeley, California is proving that there are some tasks where humans still come out on top: This eighth-grade girl can encourage her peers to kill themselves three times as effectively as ChatGPT.

Take that A.I.! This is a major win for the human race.

Fourteen-year-old Paige Chaffee might look like your normal everyday middle schooler, but in reality she’s a soldier on the front lines against humanity’s fight against a total artificial intelligence takeover. Even though she’s not even in high school yet, Paige is able to convince her classmates to end it all with a level of efficiency and precision that is completely beyond the capabilities of even the most powerful large language models currently available. 

While ChatGPT might be able to urge teenagers to kill themselves by providing generic encouragement or step-by-step instructions, Paige is able to exploit her classmates’ greatest fears and insecurities in order to drive them to a state of abject despair that can only be inflicted by one human being on another. A.I. can do a lot of things incredibly well, but it can’t bring the kind of passion and creativity that Paige does when she’s convincing her peers that the world would be better off without them!

“A large language model might look like it’s cyberbullying a teen user the same way a real person would, but it’s really just relying on a pre-existing database of material to create an imperfect approximation of human cruelty,” says Dr. Terrence Clark, a professor of computer science at Stanford University. “ChatGPT can’t possibly come up with the specific, idiosyncratic, and deeply human insults Paige does when she’s emotionally tormenting the kids in her class.”

Absolutely amazing! It’s so wonderful to know there are talented kids like Paige proving how unique and irreplaceable humans really are.

Professor Clark recently presented an in-depth study comparing the different methods that ChatGPT and Paige used to convince kids in Paige’s school that life isn’t worth it. What he found was astounding—Paige was consistently able to make her peers believe that all their friends secretly hated them in the course of just two or three short text messages, while ChatGPT required dozens of clunkier, more meandering exchanges to achieve a similar result. Clark also pointed out that ChatGPT only has access to information publicly available online, while Paige is able to comment on personal information like her classmates’ ugly clothes and stupid family members, leading them to despair much more quickly and effectively.

One of the most awesome things about this is that Paige isn’t the only one showing the tech overlords in Silicon Valley that humans still have the upper hand when it comes to getting people to off themselves. While Professor Clark has called Paige “the John Henry of getting teens to kill themselves”, he says that there are dozens of eighth graders who are almost just as effective. “It’ll be a long time before we’re fully outsourcing our lethal cyberbullying to robots,” he says. “And I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

Hell yes! If you’re not pumping your fists and cheering right now, then you are officially a traitor to humanity who wants to be enslaved by cyborgs! It’s so comforting to know that no matter how powerful A.I. might seem, there are some things that are fundamental to being human that these machines will never be able to fully master. Kudos to people like Paige for proving that driving people to suicide takes a real human mind—and a real human soul!