UCF graduates boo commencement speaker for praising AI. She called it passion.

A graduation ceremony at the University of Central Florida went sideways on May 8 when speaker Gloria Caulfield, a vice president at a property development company, told a hall full of graduating artists and communicators that AI was "the next industrial revolution." The room booed her. She brought it up again. The room booed her again. She said, "Oh, I love it. Passion. Let's go."

Which is one way to handle it.

Caulfield spent roughly three of her eleven minutes praising AI and drawing comparisons to how people once worried about email and mobile phones, as one does. The crowd of arts, humanities, and media graduates was perhaps not the most receptive audience for this particular TED talk. Graduate Houda Eletr called it "the most embarrassing, unskippable, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement" she could imagine. Unskippable is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and good on her for it.

The clip spread fast online, mostly because there's something genuinely clarifying about watching a room of young creative workers vote with their lungs. The people being told AI is good for them happen to be the people whose jobs it's replacing first. They understood the subtext. They just weren't polite about it.