Gloria Caulfield walked onto the stage at the University of Central Florida on May 8 expecting a graduation speech. Instead, the audience greeted her praise of artificial intelligence with boos.
Caulfield called AI “the next industrial revolution” during the ceremony for UCF’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media, and one person in the crowd was heard grumbling, “AI sucks!” When she later said, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” the crowd cheered, turning the moment into a public split-screen between a commencement speaker and the graduates she was addressing.
Caulfield spent about three minutes of her 11-minute speech arguing that skepticism about AI looked a lot like the early distrust of the internet, email and modern cellphones. She said the internet was “a game-changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed, like Apple and Google and Meta and so many of the others.” She also singled out Jeff Bezos, Bill Clinton, Lindsey Vonn and Magic Johnson as “leaders of significant accomplishments.”
That message landed badly with at least some in the crowd, especially at a ceremony for students in arts, humanities, communication and media fields who are trying to define their professions on their own terms. Caulfield, who is vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, founder and executive director of Lake Nona Impact Forum and president of the Lake Nona Institute, tried to meet the reaction with humor, telling the audience, “Oh, I love it. Passion. Let’s go.”
The pushback did not end when the ceremony was over. Houda Eletr of UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media called Caulfield a “corporate mouthpiece” and said, “To stand in front of a graduating class of artists and communicators and discuss Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz, is to spit on our efforts to flip the script. I’m embarrassed to have had to endure the most embarrassing, unskippable, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement. Boo to AI and boo to your agenda,” Eletr said. She added, “It will not be the rise of AI that is the next Industrial Revolution; it will be the boo-ers who refuse to take a check from the top 1% to present an empty agenda. It will be humans for humans.”
The clash at UCF on May 8 showed how graduation ceremonies can become something more than a farewell to students. They can also turn into a blunt verdict on the message being delivered from the podium, especially when the audience thinks the speaker is selling a future they do not want.
