Dear Graduates: Bite It!

Hello, hungry people.

Imagine you’ve been invited to give a commencement speech at the second-largest public university in the U.S.

Your audience — 2,000 or so graduates of the college of arts and humantiies.

These are students who have majored in journalism, advertising, digitial media, film and television production, theater, philosophy, music and other creative fields. And these are students who are, after four years of classes and, for some, $50,000 or more in college loans, on the threshold of starting exciting careers in their fields of study.

Note: I use “exciting” here in the same way you might call a heart attack exciting.

Because the future does not look quite as rosy as it did when these students were starry-eyed freshmen. The jobs that might once have been available to them are being devoured by artificial intelligence faster than you can say, “Pass the Prilosec.”

***

Enter Gloria Caufield, shown above, who was in that exact position as a commencent speaker last week at the University of Central Florida.

Caufield carries the title of vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, big players in the Florida real estate business and whose owners are worth an estimated $10 billion.

Let’s just say that Caufield did not demonstrate a particularly wise strategy in creating an alliance with UCF grads when she gave a speech that touted the wonders of AI and the brilliant work of “visionaries” like Jeff Bezos.

She was only a couple of minutes into her address, telling the students that “change is exciting, very exciting. The rise of artiificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution …” when the boos began and someone in the audience yelled: “AI sucks!”

I don’t know Gloria Caufield. She might be a lovely person. She might also be totally clueless and incapable of reading a room.

Caught off guard by the reaction, she turned to others on the podium, including UCF’s president, and said: “Whew, what happened?”

But give her credit. She stuck to her prepared speech and carried on.

“Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” she said.

At which point, the audience broke out in loud applause and more cries of “AI sucks!”

Once again, Caufied wasn’t quite sure how to react.

“OK, all right,” she said. “We’ve got a biploar topic here. OK, uh, and now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands . . .”

More boos. And, although I have no proof of it, I like to think that some of those palms were extending middle fingers toward the podium.

Also, I was unfamiliar with “bipolar” being used in that particular context. Perhaps it is an example of psychotic expressionism favored by clueless corporate executives.

***

The speech lasted 11 minutes, 11 very long minutes, during which the audience largely stopped listening and Caufield had to speak over all the laughter and conversation.

Interviewed by the Orlando Weekly, Houda Eletr, a graduate of the college’s school of journalism and communications, had this to say:

“To stand in front of a graduating class of artists and communicators and discuss Jeff Bezos . . . is to spit on our efforts to flip the script. I’m embarrassed to have had to endure [this] most embarrassing, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement speech,” Eletr said, “It will not be the rise of AI that is the next Industrial Revlolution. It will be the booers who refuse to take a check from the top 1 percent to present an empty agenda. It will be humans for humans.”

I couldn’t have put it better. Indeed, I won’t even try.

Except to say: Here’s to all you booers. Stay loud! Stay human! I hope you all find decent jobs that make you happy.

And now, here’s your chance to chime in with Today’s Poll. Granted, there aren’t a lot of options here. There’s no middle ground. It’s what you might call a bipolar poll.

And if you’d like to show that you are human, please consider pushing one of these buttons, especially the one that let’s you throw a little money my way.