As someone who has built a huge fortune over the past few decades, I couldn’t help but notice that AI is now something that young people see as a source of trouble. Well, a room full of 22-year-olds, let me tell you something about adversity: I’ve faced tremendous adversity building my own great fortune, and when I’ve faced adversity, I’ve simply turned that adversity into opportunity, which I owe you to AI. fate, excitement. Good luck to you, class of 2026!
I hope that covers everything the 2026 commencement speakers have to say about AI. If you’ve had the opportunity to address the graduating class on their big day, you can relate to the block of text I wrote instead of actually saying it.
This happened to a real estate manager Gloria Caulfield when he spoke to University of Central Florida graduates and then former Google CEO Eric Schmidt While speaking to the graduates of the University of Arizona.
But like contact tracers that work backwards to find the source of an infection, the internet has given rise to the first example of the phenomenon of using artificial intelligence. The day after Caulfield’s speech, before it goes viral.
made a speech The guy with a fortune of 450 million dollars Record executive Scott Borchetta, who founded Big Machine Label Group, and He was one of Taylor Swift’s competitors in a dispute with his masters some years ago. Only Middle Tennessee State University named the media college after Borchetta after that donated 15 million dollars. He also gave this year’s commencement speech:
It’s impossible to hate the whole speech. Borchetta says now is “perhaps the most exciting and challenging time” for media, and that’s fair enough, it’s exciting in a way. At one point, he says, “There’s more to this world than crazy wealth and political power,” and how can you not nod?
Moreover, he does not, to be perfectly clear, characterize AI as a disproportionate good for the world. At the beginning of the speech, he makes it clear. “Our biggest challenge today? Pretty easy guess: AI,” Borchetta said, and for now the crowd is with him.
The problem is that Borchetta relates AI to a big problem Big Machine faced: how to make a profit from streaming back when it first took over the music business. As Spotify prepares to put the final nail in the CD’s coffin, it has made it its business to sound the alarm to the record industry, turning the streaming ‘tool’ to its advantage. He seems to have found a way to strike some kind of profitable balance for himself and his artists in the new system.
And good for him. But the story goes to Spotify did while they have brought record labels out of a piracy-induced nosebleed and returned to profitability, they have also notoriously done so at the expense of financial stability for the artists themselves. The New York Times He wrote in 2021 While Spotify’s stated goal is to help a million artists make a living, the reality is that the streaming model mostly funnels money to labels and already-rich artists, and at the time, only 13,000 of Spotify’s seven million total artists worldwide — two-tenths of a percent — were getting $500 or more in royalties.
But Borchetta is the hero of his own story, and that’s the version he told the graduates. When the room realizes that he’s rhyming this story with AI—essentially telling them to arm themselves with AI as it flows, and to cut a man’s throat with his own weapon before his own throat is cut—you can clearly hear some of them rebelling. The screams and shouts are barely audible in the video, but Borchetta reacts like the world’s most smuggled, surfer-accented sea captain, worried about having to put down a mutiny that’s too cold:
“The AI is rewriting (adapting) the production while we’re sitting here. I know it. Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool. (Scoffs angrily) Hey, like I said, you can hear me now or you can pay me later. Hey, then do something about it, okay? This is a tool. Make it work for you.”
Of course, he also compares his AI to a genie and says, “It won’t go back into the bottle.”
The line “You can hear me now or you can pay later” is accompanied by a toothy grin, and Borchetta comes across as someone enthroned atop a mountain of corpses, taunting the audience. His words to “do something about it” sound like a real challenge.
On its own terms, Borchetta isn’t wrong. Of course, our economic system disproportionately favors the ruthless, and it certainly doesn’t lend itself to complaints that it’s unfair. To the winner goes the spoils and who can argue with Borchetta being the winner?
A recent report from the New York Fed exposes the logic behind Borchetta’s speech in all its brutality. Borchetta is a CEO, and many CEOs claim to be refuses to hire young people in favor of older workers. Survey data also suggests that forward-thinking CEOs envision smaller staffs. Meanwhile, 90% say they are using artificial intelligence in their companies.
So, again, you can’t fault Borchetta’s honesty. But when did it become good practice to tell the newest workers entering the economy that they have partial control? your cake shrinks; I have; you better come and get rid of me? Who wants to throw their hat in the air after hearing this?
