Tag Archives: speech

Let an AI robot deliver the commencement address at graduation!

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A New York university had a commencement speech – a Q&A with a student leader – delivered by AI:

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

The speaker certainly had the résumé for the job. She’d spoken at the United Nations, graced the covers of Cosmopolitan and Elle, and been a frequent guest on the world’s most-watched talk shows.

But she didn’t feel proud of her achievements. She didn’t feel excited to be speaking to the graduates. In fact, she didn’t feel anything at all.

Her name is Sophia, a human-like robot created in 2016 by Hanson Robotics and a “personification of AI in real life,” according to Lorrie Clemo, D’Youville’s president…

Unable to tell personal anecdotes about overcoming adversity or pursuing success, Sophia instead delivered an amalgamation of lessons taken from other commencement speakers.

“As you embark on this new chapter in your lives, I offer you the following inspirational advice that is common to all graduation ceremonies,” the robot said. “Embrace lifelong learning, be adaptable, pursue your passions, take risks, foster meaningful connections, make a positive impact, and believe in yourself.”

If the goal of commencement is to provide a speech that attendees will remember and look to in the future, that is a high bar.

If the goal of commencement is to provide a memorable experience, having a robot talk might fulfill that (even if the speech itself is not memorable).

It might be a niche market but how long until there is an AI robot that delivers a respectable commencement speech and is available for hire at high school, college, and graduate level ceremonies?

Language style matching in relationships

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New research suggests that people, particularly those who are happy in relationships, tend to match their language to those of those around them or to authors they have just read. Here are some of the findings:

Pennebaker and his colleagues tracked language use by 2,000 college students responding to class assignments written in different language styles. The results confirmed that language style matching extends to the written word. When an essay question was written in a dry, confusing tone, students responded with dry, confusing answers. If the question took a flighty, casual tone, students responded with “Valley girl”-like answers peppered with “like” and “sorta.”

Next, the researchers used historical figures to find out if language style matching could reveal schisms or closeness in a relationship.

They began with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychologists who corresponded almost weekly for seven years. Using style-matching statistics, the researchers were able to chart the two men’s tempestuous relationship from their early days of joint admiration to their final days of mutual contempt by counting the ways they used pronouns, prepositions and other words, such as “the,” “you,” “a” and “as,” that have little meaning outside the context of the sentence. Such words can be indicators of a person’s style of writing (and speaking)…

Married Victorian Poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, along with 20th century poet couple Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, also revealed more in their poetry than they perhaps realized.

I’ll have to watch for this. How much do others typically pick up on this when being around people who are matching each other’s language? Is this how we know people “are good together”?