A couple days ago, I was chatting with a parishioner before a talk we offered at the parish. He mentioned that ChatGPT was alive and well. He’d recently returned from a graduation tour that spanned multiple grandkids and states. He told me he heard one high school valedictory address that offered the typical niceties: we’ve grown so much and we’ve grown together, now it’s time to step out from here to pursue our ideals of success, but we’ll always be part of this school and the school part of us, and so on. He said it was fine and whatever. Then, a week later in a different state and with a different speaker, he heard something familiar — the exact same, practically word-for-word commencement address. AI was alive and well, indeed.

Of course two speeches amounts to a minuscule sample size, but I’ve seen enough and graded enough undergrad papers to see a trend, here.

I could comment on the lack of effort or creativity behind these speeches. The fact that an LLM generated the whole thing cheapens the message and somehow makes light of the magnitude of the moment and the experience people have of journeying together through the ups-and-downs of high school adolescence.

But the real cause of my melancholy might have to do with the complete loss of uniqueness. What does a high school in Kentucky have to do with one in Mississippi other than practically nothing? Yet the homogenized speeches accounted for no such uniqueness and turned the speakers into mere mouthpieces for robots. How interesting. The LLM-generated speech paid no regard to the situation of real graduates at a real place and in a real time, and the speakers apparently didn’t care enough to pay attention to that real situation of real people. How could it? Only the attentive mind of a person can do that.

Still, the consequences go beyond a common, saccharine and Hallmark-like speech. They touch on a willed out-of-touch-ness with and lack of care for the real in all its similarities and differences in Kentucky and Mississippi and everywhere in between. So there’s a flattening, a loss of dimensionality, and a loss of the self all mashed up in the nonuniqueness of (at least but probably more than) two valedictory addresses given back in mid-May.