Students at multiple universities torched tone-deaf commencement speakers who tried to tout the benefits of AI

College used to be different. We had computers, sure, but when it was 5 a.m. and you were staring down a 9 a.m. deadline for a 10-page paper, there was no algorithm there to save you. You got used to the taste of 5 Hour Energy, or you accepted failure. Muscles honed by long hours in AOL chatrooms helped us crank out hundreds of words in the blink of an eye. Were they coherent? Probably not. But they were at least derived from real thoughts, however bleary they may have been. 

Students today exist in a world in which machine-learning tools like ChatGPT have completely upset higher education. They’re using AI to write papers that professors are using AI to grade. Robot-assisted cheating has killed Princeton University’s centuries-old honor code. Teens now entering college are already hardened by years of outsourcing their education to a machine. The media frenzy surrounding AI in higher education has largely painted the Gen Z and Gen Alpha students adapting this new world as lazy or entitled, content to skate by on artificial brainpower. That may be part of it, sure. But it also sells college students a bit short: many of them are still smart enough to realize that AI is going to hurt them more than it helps.

The people who don’t realize this, unfortunately, are university administrators planning graduation ceremonies. This graduation season, multiple universities have trotted out utterly tone-deaf big-tech boosters in order to inspire a generation of students about to enter one of the most dismal job markets in recent history. At the University of Central Florida, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, a VP for a “smart city” development company, was almost booed off the stage when she called AI “the next industrial revolution,” speaking glowingly about the technology to a room full of students whose lives will increasingly be defined by it. 

It happened again, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also tried to comment on the technology’s infiltration of every aspect of public life during Arizona State University’s commencement. “You will help shape artificial intelligence,” he began, before a chorus of boos broke out. “We do not know the precise contours…” he tried to continue, before being drowned out again. This process repeated several times throughout his speech. “When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on,” Schmidt said. “The rocketship is here.” The assembled ASU students did not want to get on, it seemed, regardless of the seat.

“His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students,” Olivia Malone, a recent University of Arizona graduate, told the Associated Press. “We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?”

Big Machine CEO Scott Borchetta — famous for selling Taylor Swift’s catalogue to Scooter Braun — even got caught by the AI boos during a speech at Middle Tennessee State.

“AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” Borchetta started. There were some scattered boos from the back of the room. “I know it. Deal with it,” he quipped. “Hey, then do something about it, ok?” he said as boos continued.  

The most surreal example came at Glendale Community College, also in Arizona, where university administrators bizarrely left off dozens of students’ names from the rolls during graduation due to a mistake they blamed on a “new AI system.” Again, a chorus of boos. 

What we’re seeing here is less an unpopular technology and more a generational divide in how people see the world. Polling on the issue, thus far, is clear: Last year, Pew Research found that while 50 percent of all Americans are concerned about the technology, young people in particular are convinced that it will make people worse at thinking creatively and forming meaningful relationships. The dangers of AI, to people raised around it, aren’t hypothetical: they’ve seen it degrade their lives already. 

“Our career path is compromised by AI,” Don Strouble, a UCF grad who was at the ceremony, later told KnightNews, UCF’s student newspaper. Strouble added that he thought people like Caulfield were trying to “force a state of acceptance about something hostile to not only our livelihood but the environment and the livelihood of people living near data centers.”

For an adult on stage, AI is a glittery new technology, one that makes them excited about the future. After all, their careers are firmly entrenched. Why would Eric Schmidt care if AI tanks the job market he’s sending students out into, so long as the value of his shares in Google are going up? His peers who are actively boosting the industry are an extreme example of this. The AI industry is similar to a classic pyramid scheme, where the bottom is falling out more and more every day. Everyone, for the most part, leaves college on the bottom of the pyramid. Only now, there’s no solid ground to stand on to even start to climb up — just a bunch of binary code, zeros and ones. America’s youth are smart enough to figure out that in this future, they’re the zeroes.