“You have this moment of celebration, but it felt really disingenuous for them to take this really removed tool to read everybody’s names,” one student said.
By Darin Zullo
5 minutes to read
As universities grapple with the impending presence of artificial intelligence, some have integrated the technology into their graduation ceremonies — and some graduates aren’t happy about it.
At Northeastern University, as students walked across the stage to receive recognition for years of hard work, their names were called out not by faculty or administrators. Instead, the university used Tassel, an AI tool, to call out the names for them.
“It just felt so alien and weird, and I felt really pulled from the moment in a lot of ways,” said Henry Bova, who recently graduated from Northeastern with a degree in journalism.
Bova, who has also worked as a correspondent for The Boston Globe, wrote about his disdain for the AI tool in a recent op-ed for The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper. By opting to have AI read the names instead of a real person, the university “showed more reverence for artificial intelligence than for its student body,” Bova wrote.
“It was kind of shocking,” said Sophia Seremetis, a Northeastern graduate with a degree in design. “You have this moment of celebration, but it felt really disingenuous for them to take this really removed tool to read everybody’s names.”
Despite these criticisms, the university didn’t seem to be aware of any negative responses.
“Nearly 15,000 students and their families have celebrated graduation across Northeastern’s global campuses,” Renata Nyul, a Northeastern spokesperson, wrote in a statement to Boston.com. “Each ceremony was thoughtfully planned and executed to provide a memorable experience for all. The feedback continues to be overwhelmingly positive about every aspect of these celebrations.”
Nyul did not comment further when asked to elaborate on the “overwhelmingly positive” feedback, but Bova said the consensus was pretty clear.
“I think everybody I talked to either was disrespected or thought it was just really funny and out of place or somewhere in between,” he said.
What is Tassel, and how does it work?
While Tassel provides other graduation services, such as registration and guest ticketing, it’s the name announcement service that is AI-driven. The names are generated from a pronunciation database, which has syllabic pronunciations for over 100,000 names, according to Tassel’s website.
“We partnered with our voice professionals, compensating them to use their voices for AI-generated announcements,” a Tassel spokesperson wrote in a statement to Boston.com. “These aren’t basic AI voices like Siri or Alexa — they’re broadcast-quality and virtually indistinguishable from manual recordings.”
During registration, students can enter a phonetic spelling of their name and listen to a recording of the AI repeating it. They can either approve the pronunciation or try again, but after three incorrect pronunciations, the website will prompt students to record their name for a professional voice artist to re-record.
That means that if the AI tool can’t get a graduate’s name right, a real person will eventually get involved, but some students say that wasn’t clear from the get-go.
“I don’t think it was well-advertised,” Seremetis said. “I would have loved to opt for that had I known.”
Why would universities opt for AI?
Northeastern is far from the only university to partner with Tassel — hundreds of other schools have, including at least 10 in the Boston metropolitan area, according to a Tassel spokesperson. Sure enough, other universities who have introduced the tool have been hit with backlash of their own.
West Chester University in Pennsylvania opted for Tassel’s more expensive human voice recordings after a student petition to make the change received over 1,000 signatures. At the University of North Georgia, a similar petition received twice as many signatures.
Universities seem to be embracing the technology because it ensures that every student has the opportunity to clarify the pronunciation of their name.
“The new process improves the graduate experience. Students can hear and approve their names during registration,” a Tassel spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This approach ensures every name is spoken clearly and every graduate receives proper recognition.”
Seremetis acknowledged that the graduation ceremonies moved forward in a timely manner but questioned whether or not automation was really necessary for that outcome.
“Instead, you could have the reader actually learn the names and move things forward in a timely manner in that way,” Seremetis said.
As Bova wrote in his op-ed, “Graduation is not about the flow of the ceremony, it’s about people celebrating people.”
Why don’t students like it?
Even if the university had good intentions, Bova said the automation’s inauthenticity diminished the importance of the moment.
“It basically reduces the recognition of your students who just graduated to a task that you think should be done by computers instead of by your administrators who oversaw that and oversaw all the work that the students put in,” Bova said.
While many universities are approaching AI with caution, Northeastern has notably embraced it. Computer science students can now pursue a concentration in AI, and the university recently established a partnership with Anthropic, an AI research and development company, to provide students and staff with access to Claude, the company’s generative AI platform.
“Claude, available with your Northeastern account, can help you organize notes and draft outlines, break down challenging topics into digestible material, and more to help you work more efficiently,” the university wrote on its website. “Claude for Education includes Learning mode, which is a set of education-specific features, such as project templates, designed to help students learn.”
Bova, who wrote in his op-ed that Northeastern has “prioritized its stature as a technology-forward university at every possible turn,” said that the university’s eagerness with AI has become overbearing.
“There really seems to be a fascination with AI and really trying to push it on students as much as possible,” Bova said.
Students’ grievances with the AI-ified graduation ceremonies stem from the mixed messages on AI that Northeastern sends. Per the university’s academic integrity policy, students are prohibited from using AI to complete assignments, yet it seems administrators are free to use it as they see fit.
The lines have only been blurred further by professors using AI, leading one Northeastern student to file a complaint and request reimbursement of tuition for a class after she discovered signs of AI in her professor’s slide presentations and lecture notes. Officials ultimately decided not to reimburse her, but her professor did end up expressing regrets about the situation.
Furthermore, recent graduates who are already concerned about the current job market are worried about AI’s looming presence and the impact it will have on their futures.
“As a design major, I think AI seems to pose more threats to my career than it does as a helpful tool,” Seremetis said. “Seeing all these little things that are hinting towards this future that AI is going to be the dominating force, it’s pretty scary.”
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