AI, Commencement Speeches, and Why Human Thinking Still Matters | The Curiosity Shop
Why commencement speeches get booed, what AI work slop costs teams, and what great communication actually requires.
Overview
Two researchers and communicators dissect what makes commencement speeches land or fail, using recent high-profile booing incidents as a lens for examining moral imagination, audience empathy, and the limits of AI-generated content. The conversation moves into a frank working session on "AI work slop" — thoughtless AI output passed off as substantive work — and the real organizational and ethical costs it creates. They close on the deeper question of whether using AI to generate ideas and prose is a performance-enhancing shortcut that deserves its own category, separate from legitimate human creative work.
Key takeaways
Great commencement speeches use specific personal stories to deliver universal themes like kindness, perseverance, and doing right.
AI-generated work slop masquerades as quality output but fails to meaningfully advance a task, covertly transferring effort to the recipient.
Writing is primarily a thinking tool; outsourcing it to AI means outsourcing the cognitive work that sharpens and validates your ideas.
Setting clear expectations upfront — "painting done" — prevents most feedback conversations about substandard or AI-generated work.
Pilot users deploy AI to extend their own judgment and creativity; passenger users treat it as a shortcut, reflecting a mindset gap, not a skills gap.
Worth quoting
"What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness — those moments when another human being was there in front of me suffering and I responded sensibly, reservedly, mildly."
"The efficiency and frictionlessness that make AI appealing to writers are the same qualities that make it feel untrustworthy to readers — when we use AI to flesh out ideas, we lose the most important part of the writing process: thinking."
"Working on AI text as an editor is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscle, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised — there's nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin."
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