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College graduates were left speechless after officials at New York City’s Pace University deployed an AI model to read out their names during a commencement event this month.
A video that has since gone viral on social media shows students having a QR on their smartphone scanned, only to have an AI read their name out loud — an irritating use of the tech that turned what should’ve otherwise been a proud moment in their academic career into what commenters likened to using the self-checkout counter at the supermarket.
It’s especially galling for an institution that charges north of $50,000 a year in tuition alone.
“So even public event speakers are getting replaced,” one Reddit user wrote.
As the New York Post points out, Pace University ostensibly performed the stunt for the sake of accuracy. Well ahead of the event, officials directed students to visit a website where they could phonetically spell their names and confirm how they were pronounced.
“To ensure your name is pronounced correctly, you must register to attend Commencement through Tassel by Wednesday, April 23,” reads an FAQ on the university’s website.
Tassel is a private company that claims to have helped more than 600 schools “deliver the perfect moment for millions of students over 20+ years.”
The company offers “live ceremony stage-crossing software” designed to streamline convocation events and ensure “accurate pronunciation” of graduate names.
“With AI and our proprietary multilingual models — powered by a growing database of over 2 million names, phonemes, and linguistic patterns across multiple languages — our platform allows students to hear exactly how their names will be pronounced as they cross the stage,” Tassel boasts on its website.
If the AI butchers their name even after it was coached by the student, graduates can “submit an audio recording of their name” instead.
The software raises some thorny questions about when it’s truly appropriate to deploy an AI, particularly concerning jobs that could’ve easily been taken care of by a human.
“When I graduated, the person reading out the names had done a run through, just to check they were getting it right,” one user wrote in a post on Threads. “It didn’t take that long, and was less weird than showing your phone for them to scan.”
Worst of all, despite all those technical bells and whistles, Tassel reportedly still managed to butcher some names.
“They told us to write our names phonetically so it’s said correctly, and they still said my name wrong, which is forever documented in videos,” one user commented on Instagram.
The use of AI to read student names has been met with significant blowback from college grads across the country.
Student journalists at Northeastern University, which also deployed Tassel, published an op-ed arguing that the institution should “read our names at graduation, it’s the least you can do.”
“To many students like myself, a small switch from an AI voice bot to a physical person would mean the world,” reads the op-ed, penned by student Henry Bova and published in The Huntington News. “A human can reciprocate our sense of joy and can understand the gravity of the moment and the academic rigor that we endured to get to this point.”
“All the AI voice does is reduce the recognition of our accomplishments as a menial task to push through with brute computations,” Bova wrote.
An online petition by students at the University of North Georgia called on the university to stop “using an AI speaker for graduation,” garnering over 2,000 signatures.
The backlash was so fierce in some parts of the country that West Chester University in Pennsylvania ditched the AI altogether, as Axios reported earlier this month.
Other onlookers pointed out the irony of AI coming for the jobs of recent college graduates in particular.
“A whole lifetime of studies and 100k in debt just to have your name announced by the very entity that’s going to make your studies useless,” one Reddit user joked.
However, not everybody was opposed to the use of the tech.
“I appreciate that everyone had the chance to hear their name pronounced correctly,” one Reddit user argued. “Imagine being an international student and worried that someone will butcher your name. I’m ok with the solution the university gave here.”
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