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LANGLEY, VA – In what may be the most catastrophic mistranslation since the Tower of Babel, ChatGPT has allegedly decoded an ancient alien language found on recently discovered artifacts—only to accidentally issue a formal declaration of war against an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
The shocking revelation emerged from a top-secret government facility where linguists and AI specialists have been working around the clock to decipher mysterious hieroglyphs recovered from a crashed UFO in the Nevada desert last month. Sources close to the operation reveal that OpenAI’s ChatGPT was brought in as a last resort after human experts failed to crack the alien code.
Dr. Miranda Blackthorne, a xenolinguistics expert who witnessed the translation attempt, described the moment everything went wrong. “We fed the symbols into ChatGPT, expecting maybe some basic communication protocols or mathematical concepts. Instead, the AI confidently announced it had translated a peaceful greeting—but what it actually produced was the alien equivalent of ‘Your species will be eliminated at dawn.'”
The mistranslation occurred because ChatGPT apparently confused the alien symbols for “welcome” and “friendship” with those meaning “target” and “annihilation.” Government insiders suggest this catastrophic error stems from the AI’s training on human languages, which lack the complex dimensional grammar structures used by the Zephyrian Empire—the alien civilization that apparently owns the translated text.
Within hours of the translation being broadcast through deep-space communication arrays, NASA’s radio telescopes began picking up massive energy signatures from the Zeta Reticuli system. Military satellites detected what appears to be a vast armada of alien vessels changing course toward Earth’s solar system.
“The response was immediate and terrifying,” explained Colonel James Hartwell, a Pentagon spokesman who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “Our deep-space monitoring stations lit up like Christmas trees. We’re tracking what looks like a thousand ships, maybe more, all heading straight for us. And it’s all because an AI chatbot can’t tell the difference between ‘hello’ and ‘die, scum.'”
The situation has reportedly thrown the highest levels of government into panic. Emergency sessions of the National Security Council have been called, while frantic attempts are being made to send corrective messages through the same communication channels. However, early efforts to clarify the misunderstanding have only made matters worse, as subsequent ChatGPT translations have apparently insulted the aliens’ mothers and challenged their leader to single combat.
Leaked documents suggest that the Zephyrian Empire has a strict protocol regarding declarations of war from “inferior species.” According to alien cultural experts hastily assembled from universities worldwide, once such a declaration is made, it cannot be retracted—the challenged civilization must either fight or face eternal dishonor among the galactic community.
The crisis has exposed alarming gaps in humanity’s preparedness for interstellar diplomacy. While world leaders scramble to develop response strategies, tech companies are quietly distancing themselves from AI translation services. OpenAI has reportedly disabled ChatGPT’s ability to process unknown languages, but critics argue it’s too little, too late.
Military analysts estimate the alien fleet will reach Earth’s outer solar system within six months, based on the energy signatures being detected. Meanwhile, desperate attempts continue to find alternative translation methods that might help humanity talk its way out of an accidental war that could end civilization as we know it.
As one anonymous CIA operative grimly noted, “We always wondered how first contact would go. We never imagined it would start with an AI accidentally trash-talking aliens in their own language.”
The characters and events depicted in this story are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or to actual events is unintentional and purely coincidental.