Wow! America’s Graduating Seniors Really Fucking Hate AI!

As a rule, a college graduation is a miserable affair. If you’re an outgoing senior, you have wait around for hours on end in the sweltering heat, all while hungover and wearing a full-length black gown. If you’re a parent, you have to sit in a folding chair in the middle of a lawn for the same amount of time, seething about how you had to park your car so far away from everything. Everyone in attendance just wants to get to the roll call, and even that part is torture because, even if your last name starts with an A, they still make you stay in your seat until Zachary Zzyrowitz receives the final diploma.

But before you get to that roll call, you must endure an endless procession of deans introducing other deans, students who aren’t your kid receiving prestigious awards, and, worst of all, the keynote speaker. Let’s see what kind of sage wisdom this year’s crop of speakers had for tomorrow’s leaders!

That’s Gloria Caulfield, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at the Tavistock Real Estate Development company in Orlando, Fla. Caulfield was tapped to deliver the keynote graduation address at the University of Central Florida last week, and boy did she kill it. And by “it,” I mean her professional reputation. It began when Caulfield declared to the crowd that, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution.” UCF grads booed her for that one. Caulfield reacted to the boos with a Bari Weiss-esque, “I struck a chord!” and then attempted, in vain, to speechify her way through it. The UCF kids kept on giving her shit. Organically, I might add:

“We weren’t, like, booing or anything from the start,” Alexander Rose Tyson, 22, a graduate in animation and visualization, said in an interview. But when the speech turned toward A.I. “glazing” — excessive praise — emotions took over. “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing,” Tyson said. “It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”

It sure does, Alex. But the seniors at Blake Bortles’s illustrious alma mater were hardly the only grads subjected to the "If AI is inevitable, relax and enjoy it” treatment. Here’s former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, more deeply lacquered than a Peking duck, going in even harder on AI to the kids at U-Arizona:

“You will help shape artificial intelligence,” he told that crowd, to vehement boos. He then asked for the kids to stop booing him so that he could get to his point which, if you know your youth, was a request they were TOTALLY into obeying.

They booed harder, so Eric The Red here returned fire by saying, “If you don’t care about science, that’s OK because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” Sounds pretty fucking shitty! Tell me more, Mister Google!

“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

As if your foremost question before being shot into space is whether you’re getting an aisle seat or not. Meanwhile, outgoing seniors at Middle Tennessee State were greeted with these kind words from record executive Scott Borchetta: “AI is rewriting production as we sit here. I know it. Deal with it ... You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”

The MTSU students, not being fools, booed this asshole because they know, same as you and I know, that they’re already paying the likes of Borchetta, Schmidt, and Caulfield for that trio’s collective allegiance to the AI scam. This technology is puke. It makes its users dumber, lonelier, and depressed to the point of suicide. It also stands to make all of us poorer, given the tech sector’s stated intention to have AI do everything that humans are normally paid to do. It doesn’t matter if AI does those things well. It doesn’t. At all. But that hasn’t stopped its champions from marveling, and perhaps shedding a crocodile tear or two, at all the ways that ChatGPT can do a PhD holder’s work faster than you can nuke a plate of leftovers. 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.

America’s graduates are seeing clear through this bullshit. Imagine you’re 22 years old and about to enter the workforce with $300,000 in student debt already on your personal ledger. How would you feel if some country club asshole took the mic on your special day and told you that your duty was to build and maintain those robots? Well, to borrow from the Alexander Tyson quote up above, you’d probably think, “This sucks.” Then you’d express your dismay by booing the unholy shit out of the smug fuck who just told you to eat your AI and like it.

That’s just what these students did. They’re not buying what these grad speakers are selling them. They don’t believe that AI is the next Industrial Revolution (and why would they want another Industrial Revolution when the original one accelerated, by orders of magnitude, the destruction of this planet’s atmosphere?). They don’t want to help shape AI. They don’t want AI rewriting music production. And they don’t want a seat on the fucking rocket ship, not even if it’s first class.

What these booing students have shown this month is that they prize real, human intelligence above all, because they know that human intelligence, at its core, can never be replicated. So they don’t appreciate it when graduation day comes around and The Schmidtstain condescendingly tells them, warns them, “The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes.” I don’t like any dipshit pulling the “let me give you some advice” move, and I really don’t like it when that same dipshit’s advice is to let a slipshod piece of tech colonize their lives and, in the process, ruin it.

America’s graduates are no less enthused by that line of messaging. That’s why they’re collectively saying, "Fuck AI,” a message far more valuable than anything you heard in the video clips posted above. Good work, seniors. Now come and get your diplomas. You’ve earned them.

Oh for fuck’s sake.