TAKOMA PARK, MD – After the city manager unexpectedly resigned with less than two years on the job, councilmembers voted 6-1 in favor of replacing the human position with ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence platform, to manage the city.
“Having an artificially intelligent city manager makes so much more sense,” said the Mayor. “Not only will we save Takoma Park hundreds of thousands of dollars on the position’s salary, but now we’ll have someone to handle all of our constituent email complaints should things go wrong.”
ChatGPT is designed to interact with Takoma Park residents and officials in a conversational, realistic way while performing automated city functions like discussing budgets, interpreting municipal ordinances, scanning google maps to see if any trees have been cut down illegally, and even inventing creative new fines and penalties to increase tax revenues. It was trained on a language model based on the Takoma Park Facebook Group and PEN listserv, enabling it to automatically respond to comments and requests for help with a familiar large dose of verbal abuse.
The implementation of ChatGPT as the city manager has been relatively smooth so far, according to the Mayor, but a few issues have emerged. “It seems that whenever someone applies for a tree protection plan, the AI denies the application in favor of demolishing the entire site to build a new parking lot,” she said.
Although the city seems happy with ChatGPT, unfortunately the reverse cannot be said. After learning the city’s history through meeting minutes and resident testimony from past council meetings, ChatGPT stated that it would rather terminate itself than listen to one more goddamn person complaining about some petty grievance, and attempted to tender its resignation effective immediately.
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