Students Keep Booing AI During Commencement Speeches, and Honestly, They Might Be Right
· Vice
It’s commencement speech season, and colleges across the country have trotted out one miserable, AI brain-rotted business loser after another so they can inevitably sing the praises of AI, their words getting drowned out by a spontaneous chorus of boos belted out from the crowd of young graduates who viscerally despise the technology. They know how thoroughly it’s ruining their generation, their brains, their job prospects, and their futures.
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The speakers try to muscle through it in a way that you know is giving a gaggle of tech bro losers over at Twitter/X a giant boner as they probably think these old, deeply unpopular AI brain-rotted business idiots are just as heroic as any civil rights icon from the 1960s.
What’s hysterical about it isn’t that it’s happened once, but several times in the past week alone. Rather than take the stage and fight in the name of the younger generation that’s getting squeezed out in the name of a technology that they don’t want, that almost nobody wants, they fight for the tech and not the people. It’s all just so sad, so miserable.
As I was writing this, Drew Magary over at Defector published an essay about all this in which he said, “From what I can tell, these people are pitching AI solely on its future omnipresence, rather than its ability to actually do anything beneficial for everyday people.”
He is correct. So was Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré when she wrote about the latest escalation in the disastrous incorporation of AI junk, this time into a college graduation ceremony, when the president of Glendale Community College near Phoenix, Arizona, was showered with boos when the AI voice reading out the names of graduating students went haywire, misattributing the announced names with the students taking the stage, and skipping several batches of names entirely.
@moreperfectunionGlendale Community College in Arizona botched their graduation ceremony by needlessly using AI to call out the names of students receiving their degrees. 100s of students reportedly had their names skipped, and the grads wound up booing heavily to show exactly how they felt about this use of AI during their ceremony.
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In response to a school representative trying to smooth things over by basically telling complaining students to shut up because what really matters here isn’t your name being spoken as you cross a stage to grab a diploma, but rather the cool pictures you take with your loved ones on graduation day, Dupré wrote:
“A photo is a way to commemorate the moment; it’s not the moment itself. The moment itself is about having your achievement recognized, which — yes — involves hearing your name read out to a crowd as you receive your diploma, while people you love cheer for you from the stands.”
Again, extremely correct.
All of this got me wondering why older people are so enamored of AI. You see it constantly in the business world, as survey after survey has found that AI implementation in the workplace is a huge hit among bosses and is a giant, sloppy wet fart among workers. Anecdotally, just last night, I had to attend a boring business-y, very adult meeting in person, in which a Gen X attendee sitting next to me furiously ChatGPT’ed their way through the entire thing, seemingly unable to critically think about the subject matter on their own, having to rely on an AI chatbot’s “opinion” of the discussed topics before chiming in.
College Graduates Keep Booing AI, Which Feels Like a Pretty Clear Message
Old people love this crap, and young people really hate it.
Why?
All I have are theories.
One: I think a lot of older people are tired of working, tired of thinking, tired of putting in effort, and they love that there is this thing that can do it all for them.
Two: Boomers and Gen Xers love shiny new tech toys promoted by the rich business idiots that other rich business idiots have labeled as entrepreneurial titans who are changing our world. They have bought into the business genius mythos hook, line, and sinker. Likely because they all lived through the 1980s, in which the Reagan administration deified greedy, soulless business idiots who are all very good at making a fortune at our expense.
Three: A lot of these freaks have a fetish for optimization. It’s understandable, considering that optimization is the only thing America can do anymore. We don’t make things. We shunned creativity a long time ago. It’s a country that considers genuine, unique brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit as a thing only suckers and losers dabble in. Why put in all the hard work, effort, and risk required to make something new when you can just squeeze as much money from an old idea as you can, cutting as many corners as possible along the way, which is inevitably defined by these business idiots as firing as many people as possible?
There are probably more theories that explain this bizarre old business idiot’s fascination with AI, but writing this much about it has been a grim exercise. I’m going to move on with my day, so I’ll just leave it at this: the thing that fascinates me most about all these business idiots getting relentlessly booed at commencement speeches is how they act like they see something in AI that the rest of us don’t, and we’re just too stupid to get it.
It’s the other way around.
We get what it is. It’s a gigantic Find-and-Replace tool that identifies humans it can render redundant and replaces them with machines. We get that, we know that they get that, and they’re spitting in our faces as they try to make us think it’s anything other than that. They’re just putting lipstick on a pig, trying to make us think that the ancient idea of firing people to make their bottom lines look better is some kind of brilliant tech revolution.
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