“Excuse me. Did the gentleman say you can talk to ghosts?”
Natalie choked on the beer as the young woman’s hand passed right through her own. When she could breathe again, she wiped the tears from her eyes and got her first good look at the girl. Or rather ghost.
That was obvious from her dress. She was old. Not old in age. She had been very young when she’d died as far as Natalie could tell. Maybe eighteen. Twenty max. But she was old in vintage. Like eighteenth-century old.
“Um, hi,” she said, choosing to be polite since she’d been busted, thanks to Liam mentioning the G-word.
“Nat?” Liam asked with concern.
“It’s okay,” she said, before turning back to the ghost. “This is my boyfriend, Liam. My name is Natalie. And you are?”
“Sally Lee.”
“Hi, Sally. Uh, how long have you been here?”
“For a very long time.” The young woman smiled. “My husband was one of the first professors right after the university was founded so we lived on campus. It was all quite an honor.”
“So that would have been what year?” Natalie asked.
“Seventeen hundred and one,” she answered proudly.
“Wow. That is a long time ago.”
“Indeed.” Sally nodded.
“So, how can I help you, Sally?”
“I believe it is I who can help you. You were speaking of the professor. I knew him. Well, knew him as far as I respected his work. I’d often sit in his office and read what he was working on. So fascinating. Especially the research that involved the eighteenth century. Since that was my era, you know.”
“Understandable.” Natalie nodded.
“Students would come and go during office hours, so I know Peter as well. I was there when Peter and the professor argued about Peter’s final paper. And I know why Peter believes so strongly that he was the originator of the idea, while the professor believes Peter copied from him. Peter never admitted it to the professor, but I’m observant and I saw how Peter wrote his paper. And that is how I know the answer… AI.”
Those words, coming out of this eighteenth century woman’s mouth, were hard to make sense of.
“I see I’ve confused you. Let me explain,” Sally began. “Women couldn’t attend this university back when I was alive. But since my death, well, I’ve been sitting in on all of the classes. You can imagine after all these years, I’ve taken just about every one there is to take. But recently there has been a new course of study here at Yale. Artificial intelligence.”
Natalie nodded, impressed. “I dare say you know more about the subject of AI than I do.”
“You’ll learn. It’s the way of the future,” Sally said excitedly.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Natalie agreed in what was becoming one of the most surreal conversations of her life.
“I am sorry. I digressed. Anyway, as you may know many of today’s AI models were trained on existing published works, such as Professor Graves’s. So when Peter prompted the AI on his computer with an idea for a paper on one of the topics the professor had covered in class…”
“The AI pulled from Lionel’s paper. Lionel told me some of the phrasing was almost verbatim.”
Sally nodded. “Yes, and that’s why. You must remember that although today teachers are well aware of students using AI to write papers, back when Peter used it, the technology was still very new and much lesser known. I doubt the professor ever considered the possibility.”
Natalie nodded. Of course she was right. Two years was like a lifetime in terms of recent AI advancements.
“The tragedy is that the subject of Peter’s paper happened to be the subject of the book that, by coincidence, Professor Graves wrote and published a year after he read Peter’s paper.”
“Making Peter believe Lionel stole the idea for the book from the paper,” Natalie concluded in the tag team explanation.
“Yes. Unfortunately for Professor Graves, may he rest in peace.”
This amazing young woman had just wrapped up the final piece of the puzzle.
