Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/multiple-commencement-speakers-booed-for-ai-comments-during-graduation-speeches-263486021518

by wrxd • 2 months ago

169 152 2 months ago

nbcnews.com

cryo32• 2 months ago

Good. Why wouldn't you boo at a net loss for your own personal security?

mlnj2• 2 months ago

Especially the folks who are graduating. All they can see is 'Juniors no longer wanted' and 'Seniors also can count their days' everywhere.

Why can't they be as excited as people already invested into Datacenters? /s

cryptopian3• 2 months ago

I see a few comments on here that read "why is everyone so ungrateful and hysterical about this exciting new technology?" And I don't understand why people are surprised by this. All a young person is going to hear is "We're disrupting the world, automating employment opportunities, automating art and other leisure, innovating misinformation vectors, and also we think this technology might doom humanity. I know we're from the same kinds of companies as the social media giants you already distrust, but still pls give billions of dollars thank"

21asdffdsa122• 2 months ago

They can be hired as Data-Center-Guard against Anti-AI Terrorism soon to come?

arn3n• 2 months ago

I would be disappointed if someone took the completion of my degree and the ceremony behind it as an opportunity to push their business. There’s enough advertisements on the internet; We don't need ads in our universities, too.

camillomiller2• 2 months ago

I think the tech downward spiral is described quite well by the way we went from a historical Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford to this.

NDlurker• 2 months ago

I saw Dr. Fauci give a commencement speech over the weekend and was cheered for warning people about the massive increase in misinformation/disinformation, how AI is enabling it, and that they need to use their critical thinking skills when confronted with it.

nxm• 2 months ago

Fauci’s on the last people who should be schooling people about misinformation

chilmers• 2 months ago

And I’ll bet you can cite us a whole list of Rogan podcasts explaining why, eh?

Havoc• 2 months ago

Noticing it more on YouTube too - scripts that are definitely AI. Tons of it’s not z it’s y

10xDev• 2 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if AI is also influencing how people talk/write. I felt like I used it is not x it is y a couple of times recently and not sure whether I am just being more aware of it or if it is becoming a part of my own writing pattern because of LLMs.

sitkack• 2 months ago

I don't think this person was trolling when in conversation they said "load-bearing" and "real". It is AI brain rot.

JPC21• 2 months ago

I noticed something similar. Phrases I have noticed that Claude likes using are "... is doing major work ..." and "... worth pulling apart ...". Unfortunately, some of these have subconsciously become part of my own writing style as I noticed recently. English is not my mother tongue, so I'm pretty sure that I inherited these from Claude.

esseph• 2 months ago

Come in without a login / cookies. It's like 60-70% AI now. It's crazy!

IshKebab• 2 months ago

Not actually what this is about (but I was hoping it was because that'd be hilarious).

muglug• 2 months ago

I’m reasonably certain that Schmidt anticipated that reaction after the first speaker was booed.

It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.

keybored5• 2 months ago

It isn’t every day that Big Tech execs get to hear the truth of everyperson sentiment.

daveguy2• 2 months ago

Yeah, maybe they should listen for once. Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill.

Levitz4• 2 months ago

I don't think college campuses are exactly representative of "everyperson sentiment".

There was a time in which they deserved some respect, as a result of free exchange of ideas among intellectuals. That's far behind by now.

Mizza2• 2 months ago

Eric Schmidt also raped a woman forty years younger than him, the students were objecting to that as much as the AI. Maybe don't schedule public speaking events after being accused of rape if you don't want to get booed.

unfirehose• 2 months ago

"don't be evil"

cubefox3• 2 months ago

You are equating accusation of rape with rape. I shouldn't have to point out there is a big difference.

weregiraffe2• 2 months ago

Is "accused of rape" and "raped" the same in your mind?

delfinom• 2 months ago

The only ones that need to hear the truth are the speakers not realizing they are first to go in civil uprising over mass unemployment

SlinkyOnStairs5• 2 months ago

It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.

Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.

He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"

And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.

No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".

It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.

logicchains3• 2 months ago

AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, it'll eventually end up subjugated military by the robots of a country that did invest in AI.

raffael_de2• 2 months ago

he very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true.

If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.

seltzerboys2• 2 months ago

my best friend is a high school english teacher. he said the worst part is kids keep hearing 'it's inevitable,' the complete integration of AI into every facet of life and thinking is gonna happen no matter what anyone says or does. this is the most manipulative and untrue thing anyone could say to a kid scared of a certain kind of future. its it's own kind of misinformation to tell people that something that will take an exorbitant amount of man power, coordination, resourcing, and experimentation to execute on is 'inevitable.'

he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.

piva00• 2 months ago

In my 20+ years of career it has definitely felt the most tyrannical rollout of a technology I ever experienced.

Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic.

AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.

I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.

ngruhn• 2 months ago

Extremely sober take. And rare. Couldn't agree more.

cryptopian3• 2 months ago

To some extent, I also think the global mood around Silicon Valley has soured. I remember just starting university when Facebook was taking off in the UK, and there was genuine buzz and excitement around being able to keep up with all your old friends. Years marched on and we started to uncover all the problems with social media, and their carelessness around their own impacts to society, so most people I know who were excited in 2010 were desperately finding ways not to be there.

Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.

Levitz4• 2 months ago

AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.

The only part here with which I disagree is that I feel very similarly about the smartphone.

pickleRick243• 2 months ago

How is this different from saying the internet is inevitable? Paul Krugman famously disagreed, but that didn't make him right.

keybored5• 2 months ago

Reporter: “Seems to have struck a nerve”

The Tech Powers That Be has told these young adults that AI will disrupt the job market that they are entering. Maybe decimate white collar work. Granted, maybe this was mostly a few years ago because the ecstatic celebration among the cream of the crop of the parasites seems to have cooled down, maybe because they figured out that telling everyone in office jobs that their tech was supposed to make their lives worse was a bad strategy. But still, that was a narrative that has stuck. So these kinds of people drill that non-consentual thought into young adults’ brain. Then the same kind come to their office job graduation ceremony and take the opportunity to hype AI? Yeah, they struck a nerve that they manufactured themselves.

Two possible conclusions to draw from that.

1. Their social brains are so atrophried and withered from the daily sycophancy (occupational hazard of being very high up on the corporate ladder) that they honestly thought that grads would be happy about AI disrupting the job market (the commoners love when stocks go up?)

2. Signalling to investors that AI Is Still Happening at every damn opportunity is more important than pissing off the people you are supposed to give an inspirational speech to

va1a• 2 months ago

I've noticed, as a student, that many college students - particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost. I understand the disdain for trying to inject the concept everywhere, and like any new technology, it's apt to be used where it is unneeded, and mentioned when it is irrelevant.

But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.

phito• 2 months ago

I use AI a lot for development, but I am not sure why students should "embrace" the new technology made to take the job they are studying for.

breezybottom2• 2 months ago

You do realize luddites were people made unemployable and impoverished by new technology? Calling them luddites just proves their point.

mike_hearn2• 2 months ago

They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.

lkey• 2 months ago

They weren't even against it! They were the users of the new tech. They wanted regulation and a cut of the increased productivity. They were a nascent labour movement asking for things you and I take for granted. The responses at the time was, of course, violent reprisal.

seltzerboys2• 2 months ago

i think 'shake things up' is a doing a lot of work to minimize the impact this tool will have for this demographic in particular. especially for non-STEM college students, so in theory students who read/write a lot and therefore are probably sick of reading a lot of mid-tier, averaging slop.

embedding-shape4• 2 months ago

You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up

Watch them :)

Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.

And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.

But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).

Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.

keyringlight• 2 months ago

Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.

vermilingua• 2 months ago

I find my hatred of AI to be incredibly rational, and the cultlike veneration of the “insane productivity boost” it gives you to be truly irrational (whether or not that boost actually exists).

Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.

pixlmint• 2 months ago

As a software engineer I am so deeply ashamed of how quick so many in the field have done a complete 180 on "productivity cannot be measured by lines of code" to wearing lines of code like a badge of honour.

kstenerud• 2 months ago

It's similar to the hype around the "internet revolution", the "microservices revolution", all the "codeless" solutions over the decades...

Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.

Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).

LEDThereBeLight• 2 months ago

It’s always funny to me to see people in tech, who have largely been employed to put other people out of work for the last 50 years, change their stance on tech as soon as it starts to affect them.

maccard• 2 months ago

particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost.

What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.

Dumblydorr• 2 months ago

Maybe they see it eradicating their job prospects and being used to cheat and invalidate their hard studying by others who want an insane productivity boost? That’s not fair to them if others are cheating and they’re learning properly.

beloch2• 2 months ago

Everybody pays the price for AI, but relatively few benefit.

Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.

Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.

myaccountonhn• 2 months ago

energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations

I've heard so many different takes on this. Where did you get this information?

Sol-2• 2 months ago

200 years ago people would have booed the industrial revolution. They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits.

StevenWaterman• 2 months ago

I agree with your premise, but let's not pretend we did a good job equitably distributing the benefits of the industrial revolution

nathanaldensr• 2 months ago

Not everyone characterizes AI as "liberation from toil," and many are skeptical that any "equitable distribution of benefits" will occur in the first place. That's the point.

dude250711• 2 months ago

In France and Russia there also had been revolutions. They have found a way to distribute.

embedding-shape4• 2 months ago

They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil

Come on, we're all adults and well-aware that if companies find a way to make people more productive, it just means they'll expect more, not that we'll get more free-time.

Sol-2• 2 months ago

Both sides are at fault here, no? A consumer could work part-time and live as well or even much better as someone 50 years ago, but they largely don't want to. I do concede of course that housing is a bit limiting factor here and my "just adapt your lifestyle" doesn't fully hold.

dannersy• 2 months ago

This post is delusional. There nothing liberating about generative AI and folks aren't investing hundreds of billions because they think it will liberate people.

sevenzero2• 2 months ago

Turns out the industrial revolution doomed us for short term luxury in the grand scheme of things.

gilrain3• 2 months ago

cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits

Why would you think that will happen? You seem aware of, for instance, the Industrial Revolution and what it has ultimately resulted in.

deanmoriarty• 2 months ago

Once liberated from toil, how are these kids going to pay for rent?

oompydoompy74• 2 months ago

Warms my heart. Tech executives and politicians need to be put in their place.

tamimio• 2 months ago

AI will take your job!!
AI will lower your wages!!
AI will be used to track you!!
AI will surveil you and profile you like never before!!

Then they get surprised why they get booed. Even personally, I don’t think I met any person IRL that sees AI in a positive way. The only people who cheer for it are the techbros-AI-wrappers who want to sell you some slop SaaS, or the ones who benefit from its market manipulation and price gouging.

camillomiller2• 2 months ago

These people are so high on their own farts they completely lost the ability to think outside of their billionaires bubbles

d4rkp4ttern2• 2 months ago

I can see where it's coming from. Putting it starkly, at a high level, the broad effect of AI is this:

    devaluation of expertise,

whether in coding, or drawing, or music composition, or writing, or translation, or so many other areas.

College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally anyone. Sure, true expertise is still needed to "validate" (and train) the AI, etc, etc, but that's a small consolation.

Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.

snowwrestler• 2 months ago

No, expertise is more important when working with AI, because it can make mistakes. Expertise is the ability to predict, understand, and mitigate such mistakes.

In science for example, anyone can do an experiment about gravity. In fact millions of high school kids do every year. What makes an expert scientist is the ability to understand all the many ways such experiments can fail to accurately measure the underlying reality.

Or consider an AI writing a press release. A PR expert will catch nuances of wording that will confuse readers, or leave fodder for others to attack or mischaracterize the announcement.

College students know this because they are working with AI. And what makes them mad is the human-driven false notion that AI devalues expertise. AI looks like magic to non-experts. But it’s not, it’s more like a “junior engineer” or “PR intern” to people with actual expertise to evaluate its output.

vitally3643• 2 months ago

You and I know this. The people making hiring decisions do not. Managers and CEOs are too enamored by the thought of reduced labor costs to see reason.

Facts don't matter, only what the person making the hiring decision believes to be true, or has been fed.

College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is, the hysteria is what is causing problems.

wrxd• 2 months ago

Expertise is more important if you care about a good end result. People pushing for AI often don't care about the end result at all. They care about quantity over quality.

This can be really frustrating for someone who spent time getting experienced. They get hit twice. First they don't get a chance to do a job because "AI replaced you, sorry". Then they look at the result and what they see is low quality slop.

freedomben2• 2 months ago

Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.

I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in rust and just learn little pieces as I need to. My first couple results were not very great as I didn't know what I was doing, but I've learned enough about structuring good rust apps from the experimentations that I can crank out something pretty decent now.

The AI is so good at holding my hand that it has fundamentally changed how I approach unknown languages and stacks. I used to pick the best stack that I was proficient with for the job. Now I pick the best stack for the job, and become proficient in it. Pretty wild times we live in.

LtWorf• 2 months ago

and become proficient in it

From reading your comment, I suspect you are not becoming as proficient as you might think.

soupspaces• 2 months ago

I see your point but it's the wrong framing I think. The etymology of education is “to train, mold, nurture”, “to draw out.". Task output can be emulated more cheaply, sure.

everfrustrated• 2 months ago

I would frame it more that AI will cause the value of knowledge to plummet.

College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.

Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.

keybored5• 2 months ago

I don’t understand how this, in the context of people like Eric Schmidt lecturing people about AI, is putting it in stark terms. Starkly is to contrast these millionaire’s/billionaire’s ambitions to put them out of a job, permanently. But as usual the Silicon Valley tech disruption is put in terms of “democratizicing” X (scare quotes or not), just like taxi side hustling has been democraticized I guess.

People aren’t afraid of being out of a job, they say. It’s the usual jealously guarded guild expertise, by people who haven’t even entered any professions yet.

dfxm12• 2 months ago

It really highlights the disconnect between these executives and reality.

metalman• 2 months ago

The kids are alright!

"AI" is so bad that people dont have the time to hate it directly, and there lives are such that pragmatism forces them to identify exactly what the source of the problems in the world is,well at least when it stands up and blithers out loud strait at them.

thinkingemote2• 2 months ago

There is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this?

To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?

I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time? But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?

Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.

Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.

Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?

So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?

winfredJa• 2 months ago

you are overthinking. most of these students had hard time getting a job or didn't get a job yet. they have 100K+ loan to pay. only thing AI has successfully done so far is replacing human labor.

thinkingemote2• 2 months ago

Yes its more difficult now they are not students.

Would you say that the same students who are protesting AI have used AI to graduate? Its ok either way.

Edits - condensing the questions:

1) Are these protests reflective of the majority of students?

2) Do the majority of students use LLMs regularly in education?

Given the above questions what change in education and change in personal AI use might we see?

rglover• 2 months ago

Watching people push this stuff like this (in the face of clear public disapproval) feels like watching Uncut Gems.

You can tell that they know the music is about to stop and they're all desperate to find a chair. They didn't update their playbook for the next generation and now their cards are showing.

Short-term: oh boy. Long-term: phew.

mnmnmn• 2 months ago

This is so so good

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419

Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674

Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

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