Last week, music impresario Scott Borchetta added himself to the growing list of commencement speakers who stand in front of graduates expounding the glories of AI while the audience boos them. Borchetta — the founder of Big Machine Records — told MTSU graduates: “Deal with it. Like I said, [AI is] a tool. Hey, you can hear me now or you can pay me later.” The irony is that, if Borchetta had only used AI to write his speech, the graduates and their families would probably have been a lot less upset. If AI can do anything, it’s coming up with supportive, inoffensive things to say to strangers.
This is so weird to me. Are rich people now paying universities for the pleasure of utterly demoralizing their students? Are universities paying rich people for this pleasure?
Young people, listen: The future is not set. Yes, everything is fucked-up and scary, and there are no jobs and no one can afford to do anything, and we’re all going to end up squatting in the unused wings of abandoned mansions after the whole country family-annihilates itself. I’ll see some of you when we’re all hiding in Scott Borchetta’s second garage together, before we all pile in the car of whoever could afford gas that week to carpool to work.
But here’s the thing. Kris Kristofferson was right. If you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose, and that’s a kind of freedom. Go ahead and write that song. Read a poem to your neighbor. Go dancing. Hell, throw a dance in your backyard and invite broke strangers. Major in something “useless” like philosophy. If there is nothing you can do that can’t be done by AI, then you should do what makes you happy. You can’t compete with the electronic Magic 8 Ball the olds are enamored with, so don’t. Scott Borchetta can use AI to make songs that appeal to the streaming algorithms. What’s that have to do with people? What’s that have to do with you? Go forth, kids today, and live your lives in ways that make you happy. If you don’t know what makes you happy, well then, now you have a quest.
What will you do? How will it be? No one knows. No one has ever known, honestly. It’s always been bullshit. I find that freeing. Whatever you do, just do your best, and it will either work out or it won’t. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, you don’t need to sit around second-guessing, because you know you did the best you knew to do.
Now, young people — you’re free to go. I need to talk to the old people. And by “old,” I mean anyone of an age who feels compelled to tell people that AI is going to take their jobs.
Discussing an array of issues with generative artificial intelligence in creative work
Old people: Young people are not booing you when you talk about AI because they’re afraid of it. They’re booing you because you are full of shit. The other day I had a list of addresses in a Microsoft Word document that I wanted in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I asked Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft’s incredibly unpopular built-in AI) to do this, and it could not. Half an hour into me trying to come up with just the right phrasing to get it to do a task that I could have explained to an intern in five seconds, it told me that it had made the spreadsheet and I could download it by clicking on a link. When I clicked on the link, it took me to the Wikipedia page for spreadsheets. I, for one, don’t hate Copilot, only because it’s an invasive nightmare. I hate it because half the time it doesn’t work.
We’re telling young people they’re going to be replaced by this broken, hallucinating crap? We sound dumb. People who can barely get their phones to work without the help of 17-year-olds are suddenly AI evangelists? It makes no sense.
Oh. My. God.
The people who are the most infatuated with AI are the people who can’t work the tech they have. Imagine if you consistently can’t make your word processing program underline things you need underlined. You are constantly asking your spouse or kids for help. It’s embarrassing, because the digital natives have no problem getting your computer to do what you want, but it remains inscrutable to you. Then tech companies come along and they’re like, "Hey, just use our AI to tell your computer what you want it to do." You can just type "Underline every instance of my name." And if it underlines 60 percent of the instances, that’s significantly better than what you’ve been able to do up until now.
It must feel revolutionary. The computer, which did not ever do the things you wanted it to do, now sometimes does! And there’s no eye-rolling. AI doesn’t get exasperated. You sometimes get what you want without needing help or feeling stupid. This changes everything!
In your face, young people. We old people don’t need you to figure out why we can’t get Netflix to play through the TV. AI will do it. Send those cocky kids who think they’re God’s gift to music when they don’t even know the difference between a pentatonic scale and a heptatonic scale home. AI is going to write hits now. AI can write a business email. Let’s hand over our businesses to it!
For those of us who already know how to get Word to underline every instance of our names 100 percent of the time, this enthusiasm feels unhinged. Why would we step backwards from something working 100 percent of the time to 60 percent of the time? It doesn’t feel revolutionary. It feels stupid. Is it really necessary for me to poison Memphis in order to end up on a Wikipedia page that is irrelevant to the task I wanted my computer to complete? Of course not.
But for the people who were at 0 percent before? OK, I get why they’re encouraging the rest of us to join them in what, to them, feels like a revolutionary new world where sometimes computers actually do what they want them to do. But it’s also very funny. The boomers and Gen-Xers finally figure out how to work our computers, and we’re determined to make young people miserable about it. No wonder they’re booing.
