(Culver City, CA) From its inception back in 1964, Jeopardy! has not only blessed our television sets with its quirky questions and handsome hosts, but it has lead the way in innovation for generations. Now, 55 years later, the folks behind the hit game show are cooking up another way to mix things up. According to a press release issued earlier this morning, Jeopardy! plans to fully phase out human contestants by 2025, replacing them with AI generated players. In the age of golden television, they are doing their best to keep things interesting and they believe this is the way to do that. But what does this mean for the game?

Earlier today, we spoke with various members of the Jeopardy! production staff to find out more about the announced change. We expected them to be more surprised to hear about it, but it turns out this is old news to them. “We’ve been testing out AI contestants for years to varying degrees of success,” an engineer explained. “Alex Jacob was a popular AI we ran for a recent Tournament of Champions and you can’t even tell that he’s nothing but a green mannequin.”

“By 2025 we believe we will be able to program entire seasons using nothing but randomly generated players that must use their newly turned on consciousness to play the game. Then, of course, we shut them down if they lose and reprogram them for another game,” further explained Alex Trebek on a Skype call. “I’m super excited to quiz the newest evolution of our world.”

Unfortunately, after Trebek got off the call, another executive told us that they will also soon be able to replace the host of the show with a simulated consciousness. When we asked them if people would still watch the show without Trebek, they scoffed and told us that wouldn’t be an issue. “He’s the easiest to program, we have so many hours of footage, it’s easy. You’ve seen those YouTube videos, we can make him say whatever we want.”

Fans of the game have already taken to Twitter in anger about this news, calling it “unfair” and “not true to the spirit of the game.” To which the official Twitter account is responding with mean comments about the person that wrote them signed with “-AT.” This entire thing has been blown out of proportion and its only noon, who knows what will happen next.

All we can hope is that no matter what happens moving forward, one day we will all bow down before the AI we are currently creating and beg for our lives. Of this, we can be absolutely certain.

This was written by the Doomsayer of Delmar, Nathan Ellwood. Don’t know what that means? Why not? Follow him @NPEllwood.