Fox Guest Scolds The Children For Not Wanting AI To Take Their Future Jobs
'Get on board or get run over' probably isn't the most appealing slogan.
It’s graduation season, and across the nation, college students are tossing their hats up into the air and, well, hoping for the best. It’s not an easy time to be optimistic, given the state of things — and a whole lot of this year’s commencement speakers have not been helping. Either due to an incredible coincidence or an incredible PR campaign, multiple colleges across the country decided to have AI evangelists speak at their graduation ceremonies in hopes of getting the youth of America super jazzed about maybe not being able to cobble a living together in the very near future.
Incredibly, it did not go over well and the tech bros and babes found themselves getting booed all over. Even in Florida!
It’s true! Gloria Caulfield, who is either the VP of Strategic Alliances at Tavistock or Lisa Kudrow in disguise doing a bit as someone pathologically incapable of reading a room, found herself getting booed by the soon-to-be alumni of the University of Central Florida, which I think we can assume is not exactly a hotbed of wokeness.
Like many AI enthusiasts, Caulfield extolled AI as the next Industrial Revolution, telling students that they need to get on board whether they like it or not. Because the thing is, despite the fact that people really seem to hate and skeeve AI, despite the fact that it is consistently wrong and prone to bizarre hallucinations, despite the fact that it just came out that embracing AI over human writers is driving Buzzfeed into bankruptcy … we all must accept its ultimate inevitability. Despite the fact that studies are already starting to show that AI is making people dumber.
On Monday’s episode of Fox’s The Faulkner Focus, host Harris Faulkner held a discussion about the future of artificial intelligence with right-wing radio host Ben Ferguson in which they both agreed that these college students who are not looking forward to not being able to earn a living due to AI robots taking all of the jobs in the future are stupid jerks who care more about their own feelings than they do about America.
I was admittedly unfamiliar with Ben Ferguson, but a quick Google search demonstrates that he, at one point at least, committed perhaps the greatest crime against bangs I have seen since the early 1990s and is therefore not to be trusted in any capacity. They are bangs that scream “I probably have an adult baby fetish and definitely own at least one beanie copter.”
But sure. Let’s hear him out.
Transcript via Media Matters:
HARRIS FAULKNER (ANCHOR): A recent Gallup poll shows Gen Z’s increasingly negative view of AI last year. 36% of Gen Zers were excited about it. Now the number sits at 22%. And on the flip side, their anger toward it jumped by nearly 10%. Look, we know they are the feels generation, I totally get it. Your thoughts?
BEN FERGUSON (GUEST): Yeah, get on board or get run over. And I would just love to take another poll. How many of the people that were booing at the commencement ceremony have AI apps on their phone? Better question, how many of them used AI to pass their tests? How many of them used AI to write one of their book reports or to do one of their thesis statements? Mark my word, they’re all hypocrites out there. I don’t know a single college kid that doesn’t utilize AI.
I will say this, if you’re upset about AI, then you should be advocating for America to beat China in the AI race so that you do actually have these jobs. You better embrace it, you better fight against China, you better advocate for America to be the AI center of the world. But this booing of AI, wake up kids, you got to grow up at some point. It’s here, you use it, you probably cheated a little bit with it in school anyway. You went to bed a little earlier. You didn’t have to pull an all nighter like I did where you actually had to go to the library. So, I’m sorry, man up and woman up. Welcome to AI in 2026.
FAULKNER: Yeah. Stop screaming at the wind and become part of the solution.
What solution? No, really. What solution? Solution to what?
If anything, the thing people should be more worried about is people “cheating” by using AI, because “learning how to think” is a pretty important aspect of college. Another important aspect? Being able to get a job with which to support oneself and pay back tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student loans.
These people want so badly for everyone to cheer the coming AI-pocalypse and be okay with the prospect of losing their future ability to earn an income because all of the rich “job creators” will be able to have a mostly robot staff. It would be one thing if it meant we’d all be able to just not work while still surviving because we have a universal basic income and socialized … everything, but the people who are getting rich off of AI are the same people who, please to recall, do not want to pay their taxes.
I mean are we not currently having a whole ass issue with all these tech billionaires crying that they’re going to have to leave California for Texas because Oh God they’re gonna tax us in California? What’s going to happen if their AI dreams come true? Are they suddenly going to be okay with being taxed so that the 70 percent of Americans whose jobs have been taken by the robots can survive? My guess is no.
Though I would like to point out that it’s going to be pretty hard for them to billionaire when no one else has any money to spend.
The fact is, AI is already screwing with people’s ability to get a job. We’ve got a whole situation where companies are using AI to screen resumés and cover letters and people are so desperate that they are using AI to apply en masse to jobs they’re not even qualified for, which makes things pretty difficult for those who are actually qualified to break through the noise. Everyone I know who is looking for a job right now is going through hell right now because of this.
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These students have every reason on earth to boo AI, but instead of considering why they might be doing that or that they might have good reason, the enthusiasts just want to yell at them to accept its inevitability and learn to love it.
Like Erik Schmidt, the former Google CEO who notably said the company’s original overarching rule of “Don’t Be Evil” was “the stupidest slogan ever.”
Scott Borchetta, the former race car driver who started a music label and is best known for being the first to sign Taylor Swift (several decades ago) snapped at Middle Tennessee State University students who booed his mention of AI by looking at them smugly and saying “Deal with it. It’s a tool.”
But what he’s going to have to deal with is that people don’t actually want to listen to fully roboticized music. Not most people, anyway. The thing people enjoy about music, about art in general, is that they are very, very human. Weird, right?
Again, it’s understandable that rich people who don’t have to worry about their own financial futures because they discovered Taylor Swift or ran Google or are still collecting royalties from Friends (sorry, still 80 percent sure that Claudia lady is Lisa Kudrow doing a bit) are excited for the future of AI. But they’re going to have to “deal with it” as well when they find they can’t force people to like it or use it. And if you can’t get people on board with even AI-generated Buzzfeed quizzes, well, that doesn’t bode too well for getting them on board with AI-anything else, does it now?
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
And this is why we're deluged with these "AI" slopbuckets. The people funding them hate labor; they especially hate creatives. They want to use these slopbuckets to take all the joyful, empowering aspects of labor and only leave toil. Toil and drudgery, and charge us for the creative, fulfilling work. With them as the gatekeepers and middlemen. Oh yeah and because of this slopbucket corporate control? They'll be able to tamp down on content that offends the conservative-coded bigotries of the wealthy people.
Make sure people can't make a living off their labor or creativity, only allow them to toil for pennies on things that can't or won't be automated, and cut off any "outsider" content from distribution.
Gilded Age 2.0 is not a fun time!
‘Deal with it. I’m a tool”