The backlash to the news was vehement.
Last week, word began spreading across the student body at the University of North Georgia that next month’s commencement would look a bit different. Instead of the usual setup — a volunteer professor announcing students’ names as they cross the graduation stage — it would be another person’s voice. Well, kind of.
This year, the university, which serves more than 19,000 students, plans to adopt a third-party service that uses AI technology to clone the voices of compensated “professional voice artists” and create synthetic recordings of students’ names. Students can then review the recordings before the ceremony and send them back for alterations if they’re wrong.
The technology “ensures each graduate has the correct pronunciation of their name so that their moment is celebrated confidently and accurately,” Eddie Garrett, vice president for strategic communications and marketing, wrote in an email Tuesday to the campus community explaining the change. (He told The Chronicle that correspondence regarding the name recordings first went out to graduates last month.)
But many students are unconvinced. A Change.org petition protesting the development that went live on April 4 had more than 1,800 signatures as of Thursday. A related Reddit thread had more than 10,000 upvotes and more than 200 comments, all but a handful of them negative. The vast majority of posters walloped the administration, calling the decision lazy, demeaning, and hypocritical.
“An assembly line should be further automated,” said the junior digital-arts major who started the Reddit thread. (They asked for anonymity out of fear of blowback from the administration.) “But people, human achievements aren’t something that needs a computer.”
This is the canary in the mine of the kinds of dilemmas that we will be facing in years to come — very actively, and very publicly.
This isn’t the first time using AI tools in graduation proceedings has drawn ire. Just a few months ago, students at West Chester University of Pennsylvania railed against the use of the same service. At New York’s D’Youville University last year, many balked at having an AI robot as their commencement speaker.
These reactions, sources say, speak to the larger Catch-22 facing administrators: How do they balance pressures for innovation — in the name of efficiency or other goals — with the need to retain human parts of the college experience that students care about?
Bungled pivot, or golden opportunity?
On the petition and on Reddit, students at North Georgia have been clear: Having a human being at the lectern reading their names matters.
Using AI to create recordings, they wrote, is damaging in many ways. It sends an ominous message to departing graduates who are already wary of AI’s role in the work force. It seems hypocritical, some noted, given that the university placed a student on academic probation last year for using Grammarly to proofread a paper. And, most notably, it replaces the personal, “human” recognition of their achievements that many long for.
“This demeans all the hard work our students go through,” one petitioner, who identified themselves as a former student named Jess, wrote on the Change.org petition. “Take the time to have a real person read these names. It is noticed.”
To be sure, swaths of students are using AI tools throughout their own college experience. Many use ChatGPT regularly (sometimes with permission, sometimes without), be it for brainstorming, early drafting, research, or studying.
Leo Wu, a student at Minerva University and president and co-founder of the nonprofit group AI Consensus, spends a lot of time talking to students about the role AI plays in their college education. Students’ relationship with AI is “nuanced,” he said. And part of the distinction here, he believes, has to do with students’ perceptions of what’s at stake.
It’s one thing, he said, to be tempted to lean on AI for an assignment because the value of that assignment is unclear, for example. But a ceremony that’s recognizing years’ worth of achievements? That’s “a big deal.”
For the university’s administration, there are stakes: making commencement the “Best Day Ever” for graduates, Garrett wrote in an email to The Chronicle. He’s reiterated to students that the goal is “not about speeding through the ceremony.” Using this technology will not only support proper name pronunciations, he wrote, but it will also allow the university to “synchronize each graduate’s name with the Jumbotron video-board displays, provide on-screen captions of their degree/honors, and offer Spanish language translations.”
“Our focus is never on any one element in isolation,” he wrote. “It’s about the full experience.”
AI-aided name announcements aren’t rare in higher ed. More than 300 college clients of Tassel, the company that North Georgia is working with, use the service, a spokeswoman confirmed. Garrett cited the Georgia Institute of Technology, Kennesaw State University, and the University of Georgia as some in-state examples he’s aware of.
Asked if the administration intends to change course following students’ complaints, Garrett didn’t provide a direct response, writing: “We value student feedback and remain committed to a commencement experience that reflects our pride in them.”
For observers like Beck Tench, a senior researcher and designer at Harvard University’s Center for Digital Thriving, this scenario offers “a golden opportunity” for administrators at North Georgia to chart a path forward with students, instead of for them. Doing so, Tench added, could build good will and trust.
“If we want [students] to listen to us about AI,” Tench said, administrators “need to be taking this opportunity to listen to them.”
In the meantime, the tensions among innovation, efficiency, and humanity will continue.
“This is the canary in the mine of the kinds of dilemmas that we will be facing in years to come — very actively, and very publicly,” Tench said.
