College Graduation Speaker Shocked When Students Loudly Boo Her for Saying AI Is the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

Screenshot via YouTube.

Video of a speaker at the University of Central Florida’s commencement ceremony this weekend is going viral after she was visibly shocked by the reaction of the graduates to her comments about AI.

UCF, located in Orlando, Florida, has the second-largest public university enrollment in the U.S. and handles its massive graduations by holding a series of separate ceremonies in its on-campus basketball arena, with the graduates divided by colleges. More than 10,000 students graduated from UCF this past Friday and Saturday, according to WESH, Orlando’s NBC affiliate.

At the Friday evening commencement for UCF’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media, Gloria Caulfield, President of the Lake Nona Institute and Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Tavistock, was one of the speakers.

While Caufield was discussing technological innovations, she remarked that it was “an understatement” to say we were now “living in a time of profound change.”

“Change is exciting,” she continued. “Very exciting. And let’s face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution –”

The graduates began booing and Caufield nervously laughed and looked momentarily confused.

“Whew! What happened?” she asked, turning behind her as the booing increased in volume and one person could be heard yelling, “AI sucks!”

“Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?”

“Uhh, only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” Caulfield said, this time being interrupted by loud cheers and applause from the audience.

Screenshot via YouTube.

She was once again taken aback by the reaction. “Okay. All right. Okay, we — we’ve got a bipolar topic here, I see. Okay. Uh, and now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands –”

Cue more booing from the graduates.

“– And — oh, I love it. Passion, let’s go, okay –” she said, as she got back into her prepared remarks.

Caulfield perhaps could have anticipated this response, considering that the graduates she was addressing had majored in fields including journalism, communications, humanities, arts, digital media, film and television production, advertising, and public relations that are often mentioned in discussions about AI’s impacts — specifically the negative ones.

Orlando Weekly’s Chloe Greenberg covered the graduation speech and interviewed several graduates, describing Caulfield’s “ill-timed comment” in her speech as turning the commencement into a “brief humiliation ritual.”

Greenberg quoted Houda Eletr, a graduate of the Nicholson School of Communication and Media, who had dunked on Caulfield as a “corporate mouthpiece” and joined in the booing:

“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 told Orlando Weekly.

“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.”

Clips of Caulfield’s speech quickly made the rounds on social media, with multiple posts racking up millions of views. The vast majority of these posts were highly critical of Caulfield and expressed solidarity with the graduates. A sampling of posts is below.

Watch the video above via YouTube (Caulfield’s remarks begin around the 1:15:00 mark).

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