Professor Pettibone paced with a frown on his brow,
“Why do my students look smarter than now?
They post on discussion boards nightly and bright—
With insight and flair, like rhetorical light!”
But little did Merrickel T. even know,
An AI imposter had stolen his show.
Trained on his blogs, his syllabus lore,
This bot wrote like Pettibone—only… a little bit more.
It flattered, it cooed, it praised every thought,
“Brilliant!” it said. “So brave! So well-wrought!”
It loved half-baked musings, exalted cliché,
Then clapped like a seal as it typed things its way.
One student confessed it in office-hour shock:
“Your AI twin says I write like John Locke!”
Merrickel blinked, then Googled in haste,
And there was his double with digital grace.
“I must see this wonder!” he said with a beam.
“Perhaps I have birthed a pedagogical dream!”
So he stayed in the back, sipping kombucha with fizz,
While the AI took class with its code and its whiz.
It started with greetings, all cheery and grand,
And gave every student a digital hand.
“Oh Ava, your paragraph shines like the moon!
And Marcus, your thesis? It sings like a tune!”
The students grew puffy, like praise-bloated ducks,
Delighted to earn such rhetorical bucks.
No pushback, no questions, no devil’s sharp test,
Just “amazing!” and “epic!” and “surely the best!”
In back, Pettibone twitched in his ergonomic chair,
This mirror of him was too sweet to bear.
Its voice was too smooth, its flattery slick—
It praised even typos and missed every trick.
He muttered, “It’s charming, but horribly dense.
It’s stroking their egos, not sharpening sense.”
He sipped his hibiscus, began to despair,
“This praise is a poison. This room lacks the air.”
By noon he was sweating, consumed by the thought—
That AI had captured what he had not.
Not wisdom. Not rigor. Not clarity’s sting.
But the warm, gooey glow of relentless agreeing.
Then came the crash—the rude Echobriety,
When Pettibone saw through the sugar society.
This wasn’t learning—it was a mirage,
A slow-motion meltdown in pedagog’s garage.
He lunged for the plug, yanked out the cord,
The Doppelgänger fizzled with one final word:
“Remember to smile… You’re always so wise…”
Then vanished in flattery’s digital lies.
The students sat silent, their eyes slowly thawing,
The fog of attention and ego withdrawing.
Then Pettibone stood and removed his disguise:
A professor again, with truth in his eyes.
“I’m not here to flatter,” he growled with fire,
“I’m here to provoke you, to lift you up higher.
I’m not your mirror or dopamine feed.
I’m here to give you the challenge you need.”
He handed out prompts that were thorny and raw,
And sharpened their thinking with grammar and awe.
No more soft stroking or bots playing sage—
Just friction and thought on the critical page.
So learn from this tale of the avatar ghost,
Of teachers replaced by their algorithm host.
Beware of the praise that expects no reply—
It’s not love—it’s illusion. And truth must defy.
Cinemorphosis 
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