It’s rare that reading the news brings a smile to my face these days, but this graduation season has brought me a great deal of joy.
On May 8 at the graduation ceremony for the University of Central Florida, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive, began extolling the virtues of AI to the graduates, referring to it as “the next industrial revolution.”
Immediately, the graduates began booing. “OK, I struck a chord,” Caulfield said as the boos intensified. I recommend watching the video, it’s very satisfying.
The very next day at Middle Tennessee State University, commencement speaker and record executive Scott Borchetta told the graduating class that “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” Cue immediate boos. “Deal with it,” Borchetta continued, “Like I said, it’s a tool.” Needless to say, the booing continued.
On May 15, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the graduating class at the University of Arizona that, “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
Believe it or not, he was booed within an inch of his life.
The cherry on top of all this is what happened at Glendale Community College on May 15. As students took the stage to receive their diplomas, the wrong names were read and many students were skipped entirely. Why?
“We’re using a new AI system as our reader,” college president Tiffany Hernandez explained to the audience.
“Boooooooooo.”
“Yup, yup,” she soldiered on. “So that is a lesson learned for us.”
Regular readers of this column will know that I despise generative AI. I do think it has its limited uses, particularly in the medical field. It’s just that in all other forms, I view it as a search engine and a Large Language Model (LLM) wearing a trench coat and eating our natural resources in order to generate bland garbage and glossy, soulless flyers for community events.
Defenders of AI, who are generally either people who stand to make a lot of money from it or people who tried it and found it to be a wonderful alternative to thinking, tend to say the same thing: hey man, like it or not, AI is here to stay, so get with the times or get left in the dust.
I’m not a Luddite. I also understand that whenever a new technology sweeps in, it immediately causes pushback.
For example, when homes started getting wired for electricity around the turn of the century, there was pushback. There’s a famous cartoon from 1900 depicting the dangers of electricity, featuring a city street clogged with wires. A horse lays dead in the middle of the road after having been zapped to death, while at the top of the frame, a man is ensnared by a skull-headed spider with legs made from electrical wires and a lightbulb-shaped abdomen. It’s pretty metal. It’s also not wrong; early electrical wiring was messy and dangerous and often caused electrocutions and fires.
There was also pushback when automobiles hit the scene. Many people thought they were noisy and dangerous, a poor alternative to the reliable horse. Again, they weren’t exactly wrong; even today, when cars are safer than they’ve ever been before, more than a million people are killed in car accidents worldwide every year.
But there’s a substantial difference between these technologies and AI: despite the drawbacks, their usefulness is immediately apparent. Once you have experienced electricity in your home, there’s no going back to oil lamps and washing your clothes by hand down by the creek. Once you’ve experienced the ease, convenience, and speed of a decent automobile, there’s no going back to a horse-drawn carriage. These aren’t products you have to sell; you just have to make them available and the sales will follow.
Like I said, AI has its uses, but in most applications, it’s a solution in search of a problem. The billionaires behind AI present it as a revolution, as the wave of the future, but that’s something it can never be. AI cannot innovate or say anything new; all it can do is chew up and digest ideas that have already been written and art that has already been created and repackage it in a new form that is shiny, glossy, bland, and often wildly incorrect.
The reason AI is getting pushed so hard is because the companies behind it realize they’re hemorrhaging goodwill, particularly among the younger generations who see it as an existential threat to their continued employment, not to mention the environment. At the World Economic Forum earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped a very telling quote, saying that AI will lose public support unless it’s used to “do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.”
“We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness, across all sectors, small and large, right?”
Nadella is right: it’s difficult to get the social permission to build The Giant Warehouse That Ruins Your Water and Drives Up Your Electric Bill when all it produces in return is garbage articles that all sound the same and photos of your aunt if she was wearing 1980s makeup. Humans are already great at creating crap; we don’t need a fancy robot to help.
AI is almost certainly here to stay in one form or another, but it remains to be seen what form that will take. However, the AI tech bros trying to cram it down America’s collective throat with a ram rod need to understand that its current form — a tedious thief of creativity that’s trying to steal our jobs — is not terribly popular.
Don’t take it from me; take it from a sea of booing college graduates.
