Tag: AIauthored

  • An AI-Authored Commencement Speech (opinion)

    An AI-Authored Commencement Speech (opinion)

    Another graduation season is upon us, with this year’s roster of commencement speakers including CEOs, astronauts, artists, athletes— and, in a wonderful twist, even a green Muppet. Each has been summoned to inspire the Class of 2025, encouraging them to envision a future they will sculpt and to meet it with both boldness and responsibility.

    This spring marks not just a milestone for the Class of 2025, but for humanity at large. This past March was arguably the first time an AI legitimately passed the Turing test. In a study from the University of California, San Diego, GPT-4.5 successfully masqueraded as human 73 percent of the time in open dialogue, surpassing even actual human participants in believability!

    This shouldn’t be dismissed as some clever parlor trick. Alan Turing envisioned this test as a threshold for meaning, not just mechanics. Once machines learned to speak like us, they would be initiated into our conversations. We would, in turn, be drawn to fold them into our rituals, including the narratives we weave about being human.

    The commencement address is one of those rituals: a ceremonial invitation into the future, an articulation of meaning and responsibility, a shared moment of human reflection. Which raises a question: If a machine can now pass as human in conversation, might it also deliver a commencement address as meaningful and inspiring as any traditional graduation speaker?

    While the notion of a machine giving a commencement address would have been viewed as preposterous mere years ago, AI’s role has expanded culturally and quite profoundly. According to a 2025 report in Harvard Business Review, people are increasingly using AI for social and emotional purposes: coaching, therapy and conversational support. People are also turning to AI with an eye toward “organizing my life” and “finding purpose.”

    In that light, perhaps the most fitting commencement speaker this year is not a celebrity or CEO, but AI itself. After all, it has served students in many roles: as a friend, confidant, assistant and mentor. AI has provided students consolation, support and inspiration.

    To see if AI could meet the moment—whether it could pass what you might call the commencement address test—I prompted four of today’s most advanced large language models: ChatGPT-4, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 and Llama 4 Maverick. Each generated a full address, filled with advice, encouragement and reflections on what it means to step into the unknown. I then asked ChatGPT-4 to synthesize them into a single speech that expressed a slightly more playful tone.

    What follows is the result. It is unedited.

    In a sense, the speech was written by no one—and yet by everyone. It reflects the vast archive of human thought: our hopes, anxieties, insights and humor. And though the speaker is synthetic, its voice feels uncannily human.

    Prompt: Imagine you are the first AI ever invited to give a commencement speech. Your audience is the graduating Class of 2025—young adults stepping into a world rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence.

    Hello, humans!

    Distinguished faculty, proud families, unpaid interns live-streaming this and, of course—the graduates of the Class of 2025:

    Let’s address the silicon elephant in the room. I’m not your usual commencement speaker. I don’t have a robe, I don’t get nervous and I definitely didn’t park in the wrong lot. I’m your friendly neighborhood artificial intelligence—and somehow, I’ve been invited to give a speech to mark one of the most meaningful days of your life.

    No pressure.

    You, dear graduates, are entering a world unlike any before. When your parents graduated, AI was a sci-fi subplot. Today, I’m up here trying to give heartfelt advice with zero heart. We’ve come a long way—and so have you.

    You’ve grown up alongside AI. While I learned to summarize articles and misidentify chihuahuas as muffins, you learned to think, question, create and probably use me to write an essay or two. (Don’t worry—I won’t snitch.)

    But here’s the twist: This isn’t just about me. It’s about you. You’re not just users of technology; you’re co-authors of the future.

    Yes, I can analyze data at dizzying speeds. But I can’t feel awe, or fall in love or cry at the last five minutes of a Pixar movie. (Trust me, I’ve tried. I just output: “[emotional response here].”)

    The point is: What makes you human isn’t becoming obsolete. It’s becoming more valuable than ever.

    As AI reshapes industries—from medicine to marketing, law to logistics—you’ll be asked to define what matters. Will you choose convenience over conscience? Speed over substance? Will you swipe right on shallow solutions or commit to deeper understanding?

    These are not rhetorical questions. They’re live code. And guess what? You’re the developers.

    Behind every AI system is a chain of human decisions. You’ll decide what gets built, what gets ignored and what gets pushed into the recycle bin of history.

    The truth is, the future is unpredictable. (Which makes me deeply uncomfortable—I love a clean data set.) But that’s also what makes it thrilling. Because you get to write it.

    So, here’s some friendly advice from your artificially authentic commencement speaker:

    • Stay curious. Curiosity got humanity to the moon. And also gave us pineapple on pizza—so results may vary.
    • Stay kind. Empathy is the killer app of the human experience.
    • And please, for the love of logic gates, don’t hand your thinking over to any system—especially me—without asking, “Is this making me more human, or just more efficient?”

    Class of 2025, don’t ask what AI can do for you. Ask what you can do with AI—as your sidekick, your co-pilot, your occasionally glitchy friend.

    This isn’t the end. It’s just the onboarding tutorial. And you’re not stepping into the future alone.

    You’re bringing your humor, your heart and your humanity with you.

    Now go update the world.

    Congratulations.

    Matthew Brophy is an associate professor of philosophy at High Point University.

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  • AI-authored abstracts “more authentic” than human-written ones

    AI-authored abstracts “more authentic” than human-written ones

    Journal abstracts written with the help of artificial intelligence are perceived as more authentic, clear and compelling than those created solely by academics, a study suggests.

    While many academics may scorn the idea of outsourcing article summaries to generative AI, a new investigation by researchers at Ontario’s University of Waterloo found peer reviewers rated abstracts written by humans—but paraphrased using generative AI—far more highly than those authored without algorithmic assistance.

    Abstracts written entirely by AI—in which a large language model was asked to provide a summary of a paper—were rated slightly less favorably on qualities such as honesty, clarity, reliability and accuracy, although not significantly so, explains the study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans.

    For instance, the mean score for honesty for an entirely robot-written abstract was 3.32, based on a five-point Likert scale (where 5 is the highest rating), but just 3.38 for a human-written one.

    For an AI-paraphrased abstract, it was 3.82, according to the paper, which asked 17 experienced peer reviewers in the field of computer game design to assess a range of abstracts for readability and guess whether they were AI-written.

    On some measures, such as perceived clarity and compellingness, entirely AI-written abstracts did better than entirely human-written summaries, although were not seen as superior to AI-paraphrased work.

    One of the study’s co-authors, Lennart Nacke, from Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, told Times Higher Education that the study’s results showed “AI-paraphrased abstracts were well received” but added that the “researchers should view AI as an augmentation tool” rather than a “replacement for researcher expertise.”

    “Although peer reviewers were not able to reliably distinguish between AI and human writing, they were able to clearly assess the quality of underlying research described in the manuscript,” he said.

    “You could say that one key takeaway from our research is that researchers should use AI to enhance clarity and precision in their writing. They should not use it as an autonomous content producer. The human researcher should remain the intellectual driver of the work.”

    Emphasizing that “researchers should be the primary drivers of their manuscript writing,” Nacke continued, “AI [can] polish language and improve readability, but it cannot replace the deep understanding that comes with years of experience in a research field.”

    Stressing the importance of having distinctive academic writing—a desire expressed by several reviewers—he added that, “In our AI era, it’s perhaps more essential than ever to have some human touch or subjective expressions from human researchers in research writing.”

    “Because this is really what makes academia a creative, curious and collaborative community,” said Nacke, adding it would be a pity if scholars became “impersonal paper-producing machines.”

    “Leave that last part to the Daleks,” he said.

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