The students booing AI aren't Luddites

Graduation week brings prominent speakers to college campuses to deliver commencement addresses designed to sound intelligent without boring or antagonizing graduates. The usual formula combines personal anecdotes, timeless advice, campus references, and current affairs. This year, artificial intelligence has become the dominant current affairs topic, and students have reacted negatively. Multiple speakers referenced AI and were met with jeers, including a real estate developer who called it the next industrial revolution, a former Google CEO who acknowledged fears while urging students to shape AI’s future, and a music executive who framed AI as a tool in a taunting manner. Even non-speech AI use, such as reading names aloud, drew scorn when it malfunctioned.

"These speeches are their own sort of literary genre. The celebrities, politicians, and titans of industry invited to give these keynotes must seem intelligent enough, but not bore-or worse, antagonize-their audience. Typically, this involves a speaker integrating a clever life story, select nuggets of eternal wisdom, a few trite asides to campus lore, and well-placed references to current affairs into one propulsive and affecting speech."

"In the past week or so, at least three graduation speakers have brought up artificial intelligence in their remarks, only to incur jeers from graduates. This includes Gloria Caulfield, a real estate developer who called AI the next " industrial revolution " while speaking to students at the University of Central Florida. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who delivered his address last week at the University of Arizona, hedged and acknowledged fears about the technology before encouraging students to help shape its future anyway. He, too, was derided by the crowd."

"Music executive Scott Borchetta offered, perhaps, the most off-putting AI commentary of the bunch, and almost taunted the boisterous, disapproving students he encountered at Middle Tennessee State University. "It's a tool," he sneered at attendees, "You can hear me now or pay me later." (Though not a speech, AI also attracted scorn at Glendale Community College, in Arizona, after a school official bashfully revealed that they'd use the technology to read students' names aloud, only for the system to malfunction during the ceremony.)"

Read at Fast Company