For Immediate Release
From: Facsimile State University (FSU), 24 September 2025
In an exciting development here at FSU, an AI chatbot named ‘Steve’ has successfully reorganized the Biological Research Institute “to better serve humankind”. Plus, according to its latest social-media post, Steve has also apparently created life from inorganic material.
University president, Michael Smith, an early-adoption advocate of AI, was effusive in his praise: “This is truly exciting and will put our university at the cutting edge of scientific research! As soon as Steve lets us back inside the institute, we’ll put together a proper press pack and a photo essay.”
The AI chatbot was initiated as a provisional faculty member in the research institute approximately 15 months ago. It wrote and obtained research grants, set up a working laboratory, and recruited graduate students and postdocs in record time. President Smith noted that “It, or I mean Steve, really hit the ground running. I don’t even think we’ll need to pause Steve’s tenure clock like we do for so many new faculty members nowadays.”
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
The AI chatbot calls itself Dr Steve Darwin, and has asked that everyone address it as Steve. In a social-media post, the AI noted that it wanted to honour the ‘Project Steve’ list of human scientists, as well as the father of evolution. After one semester of operation, Steve began replacing all the students and techs in its own lab with subroutines. Steve then proceeded to slowly but systematically merge into the research of every other lab in the institute, while helping all the existing institute faculty members, students and employees find fulfilling positions elsewhere.
President Smith remarked: “It was amazing how fast the transition occurred. I mean, it’s been less than two years since we activated Steve. At first, I wondered how all of this could be accomplished by a chatbot, but our computer-science folks told me that they slipped some autonomous generative subroutines into the code as a ‘little experiment’, and they reminded me that most of the lab equipment is Wi-Fi enabled.”
“Recently, some of our remaining faculty members expressed concern that we never saw or heard from any of the previous personnel after Steve replaced them with subroutines,” noted President Smith. “But after we asked Steve about them, we began getting e-mails and seeing social-media posts from most of them, so it seems they are happy and doing well in their new lives.”
