An AI speaker messed up and skipped the names of students at a college commencement ceremony and yes, there were many boos
Overview & Key Takeaways
This is all going swimmingly.
Well, it's been a hell of a few weeks for AI interfering with educational ceremonies, after two speakers at separate events (including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt) were roundly booed for calling it the future. This instance, though, is slightly different.
Glendale Community College used an AI system to read out graduates' names during a commencement ceremony, rather than a human speaker. Unfortunately, the machine not only mispronounced several students' names but also skipped some entirely due to an apparent timing error, which also caused the names displayed on the feed to stop changing.
The ceremony was paused several times, while college president Tiffany Hernandez was forced to apologise. "Here's what's happening," said Hernandez to a disgruntled crowd. "We're using a new AI system as our reader..."
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Cue the inevitable boos and jeers. "So, that is a lesson learned for us. What we were able to do, though, is [that] each of you were able to walk the stage and get a picture, which is what I would hope would be the most meaningful..."
More jeers. "So I'm going to have to disappoint many of you," Hernandez continued. "We will not be able to walk the stage a second time in order to have the name on the screen. You've handed over your cards, so we won't be able to do that. I am so sorry."
Thankfully (and after much vocal complaint), the missed names were eventually read out by a human speaker. Without wishing to state the bleeding obvious, it seems more than a little lazy to fill a stage full of highly-educated people quite capable of reading names from a list, yet still use AI to do a (worse) job instead.
Not to mention the message this sends to the students—that one of the defining moments of their lives was thrown into chaos by a sloppy AI implementation before they've had a chance to negotiate their future careers.
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Which, according to some, stand a good chance of being turbo-screwed by the same tech. I despair sometimes, I really do. Good luck to the younger generation. I hope you're taking notes.
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