Colleges Use AI to Translate, Caption Commencement Ceremonies

University graduates are booing and heckling corporate executives who praise AI during their commencement ceremonies, and the only people who seem to be genuinely surprised by this are the executives themselves. In a procession of viral videos, 2026 commencement speakers like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt face loud and sustained jeers from students after praising AI and describing the technology as both inevitable and mandatory. The videos have clearly struck a chord among young people entering a bleak job market in an increasingly unstable world. "They deserve everything they're getting," Penny Oliver, who recently graduated with a poli … Read the full story at The Verge.

The University of Southern California will put one of the largest donations in its history toward applying AI in fields where the university already has strengths, including film and the arts.

The University of Southern California wants to integrate artificial intelligence into fields like health care and the arts. Other universities are also using donations to focus more on A.I.

Jamillah Knowles & Digit / Pink Office / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 Yolanda Gil is a professor at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as Senior Director for major strategic AI and data science initiatives. From 2018 – 2020, she was president of AAAI. In her invited talk at AAAI 2026, she […]

IceMing & Digit / Stochastic Parrots at Work / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 By Mayank Kejriwal, University of Southern California When a human says an event is “probable” or “likely,” people generally have a shared, if fuzzy, understanding of what that means. But when an AI chatbot like ChatGPT uses the same word, it’s not […]