If you don't want to be booed at while yapping about AI during a commencement speech, then maybe you shouldn't be doing that in the first place.
College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
171–180 of 405 posts
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you seriously don't understand why?
Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore? The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing. Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field t…
Because the manager/owner/techbro class has decided we don't need employees for anything anymore, AI can do it all. This is phenomenally untrue, but that doesn't help you pay off your $400K of student loans or buy a house.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
For folks that didn't read the article, it seems he was talking about music production.
that must be a good message: - you all like music enough to go to a four year program and spend lots of money to study it. - you all probably have been creating music since you were a child and really love it. - well.... - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content. - we now have a magic button that can make content by ripping off every previous artist we've trained our models…
> - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.
They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.
I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.
Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#174If I were an adversary of the U.S. I would encourage anti-AI sentiment among young people, to my strategic advantage.
They don't need much help, the industry's incentives are not aligned with the public interest.
Disruption, by definition, has winners and losers and the losers tend to be more visible, more vocal, and more immediate than the winners.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and fervently pushed by people over 55. Source? I think you're conflating "pushed by CEOs" (which might lean on the older side) with "pushed by people over 55".
I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it. Every time there is push back from younger posters followed by a bit of a generational faceoff. I think boomers are still inclined to see technology as exciting space-race stuff. As a millennial…
>I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.
No, old people just don't bother hiding it, even though they use it less.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what is he supposed to say? "Ok let's stop developing AI so you can all have the exact job you trained for?" That hasn't been the case for decades. When I left my eduction I could sequence 200 basepairs using gels. Now I process terabytes of NGS data on supercomputers. I dealt with it, I enjoyed it. Edit: Not saying these kids have nothing to rage against, they can't afford houses, are uninsured, they face a huge…
>But why so anti AI specifically I think maybe AI is just the last straw for many people. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely. Whether or not it can achieve that is secondary to the goal itself. Grads are facing a brutal job market where much of what they just spent several years of t…
You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#177"After my speech for the troops about how we are losing in Iran, my speech to children with cancer about how we've gutted research, sure I can then give a speech to people entering the job market about how AI is ruining the job market" Perfect, that's exactly the message of despair we want to send! (How I imagine picking these speakers goes at every college campus)
I bet "deal with it" is exactly the kind of inspiring message these kids were hoping to hear.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
College students had 4+ years to learn about the real issues before the graduation ceremory, and the rest of their lives after it. Rubbing every problem in the world in their face at a graduation ceremony is just gauche . To everything a time and a season. Not every second has to dedicated to "problems".
"Not every second has to dedicated to "problems"." I was a lot quicker to agree with this sentiment in prior decades where we had notionally fewer of them, the big ones seemed better understood, and the folks managing the levers of power at least managed the appearance of competence.
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Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "boos" are an indication that kids finally understand who to blame. In a dark time, that's a ray of hope: the kids are alright.
> the kids finally understand who to blame You do realise that “sticking it to the man” is something that kids are uniquely good at? This isn’t something that’s only just happened in the last generation. It’s how society has operated since before we lived in caves.
The increased younger vote for Trump is a big part of our current set of problems.
Remember: Google was declared a monopoly by Bidens Justice department. We were setting up a system to break down monopolies and restore order to the market. Trump got rid of that.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I hear that "AI is just a tool" nonsense one more time...
Ok, so what is it then? To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
If I use AI to automate swathes of your field out of a job AI isn't the only tool.