We would like to address a recent controversy involving the Columbia Spectator.
Students have expressed concern regarding the Spectator’s latest issue, in which the publication proudly displayed their new advertising partnership with Google Gemini. Said advertisement encourages students to take advantage of free Gemini access, despite the oppressive use of AI on campus already. Use of AI causes rampant academic misconduct and discourages the craft of writing.
However, given enormous budget cuts to print media by the Columbia University Activity Board we understand and support the Spectator’s need to receive funding from a multi-trillion dollar tech conglomerate despite being “financially independent from the University since 1962” and therefore completely unaffected by said budget cuts.1
On an unrelated note, The Columbia Federalist would like to announce our October issue, coming later this month, made possible despite significant budget cuts due to generous support from Palantir (a proud Cloud partner of Google and Gemini). We are also happy to offer students a free year of Palantir membership! We’re excited to begin this journey with Palantir, and hope to extend its goals of tracking and profiling civilians to Columbia.
In further solidarity with the Spectator, we plan to outsource all future writing to Gemini, so that they won’t feel alone in writing with the tone of Mitch McConnell freestyling on sedatives. We also plan to partner with Flock Safety for our investigative work and ICE for campus distribution, and have invited the Spectator to join these partnerships. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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1https://www.columbiaspectator.com/about-us/
