Clueless graduation speaker astonished to find that communication and media students hate AI

A video from the Spring 2026 Commencement ceremony at the University of Central Florida's Nicholson School of Communication and Media perfectly encapsulates the information divides around AI. Speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at a Bahamas-based private equity fund, blithely hypes AI only to find, to her astonishment, that media grads might not agree.

She hits the clichés ("artficial intellgence is the new industrial revolution") and the crowd starts grumbling. Baffled, she pauses, then laughs. "What happened? I struck a chord. May I finish?" They simmer down. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she continues, only to be cut off by wild cheering.

"We've got a bipolar topic here, I see," she says, having not seen what's right in front of her.

Caulfield isn't an alum of the university, but being "instrumental in identifying strategic intersections with stakeholders" and "quantifying new revenue streams for integrated healthcare systems" she is at the heart of professional-managerial culture and ensphered by the AI bubble. She seems to have no idea why people might not like AI and amazed to find such strange creatures standing before her at a graduation ceremony.

Meanwhile, AI is being blamed (not entirely honestly) for the gutting jobs in the tech and media industries, with AI company CEOs eager to take the credit and promise more.

Here's her speech, embedded below; it begins 1:16m into the stream. The AI hype and its response begins at 1:21. Caulfield will be fine; according to her bio, she has globally recognized innovation gatherings to attend and New Age guru Deepak Chopra's wellness platform to advise.