students boo – In the past week, multiple graduation speakers—including Gloria Caulfield, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Borchetta—touched on artificial intelligence and were met with jeers. The pushback is fueled less by ignorance than by anxiety: students are heavy AI users, yet
Graduation week is supposed to be a parade of polished wisdom—life lessons, a few campus-hallowed jokes, and a carefully calibrated nod to whatever dominates the headlines.
This year, though, the dominant headline walked onto the stage as well. And in at least three commencements over the past week or so, students didn’t want to hear it.
Gloria Caulfield, a real estate developer who spoke to students at the University of Central Florida, called artificial intelligence the next “industrial revolution.” The phrase landed with the crowd as something to jeer, not applaud.
Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who delivered his address last week at the University of Arizona, tried a different approach. He hedged, acknowledged fears about the technology, and then encouraged students to help shape AI’s future anyway. The crowd still derided him.
At Middle Tennessee State University, music executive Scott Borchetta appeared to stumble into the moment in the most jarring way. He encountered the disapproving students and almost taunted them with a line that read like a dare: “It’s a tool,” he said. “You can hear me now or pay me later.”
Even when AI didn’t show up as a speech, it showed up as a glitch. At Glendale Community College in Arizona. a school official revealed that they would use the technology to read students’ names aloud. During the ceremony. the system malfunctioned. turning an otherwise routine part of graduation logistics into a live reminder that AI can fail in public.
Put together, the pattern is hard to miss: artificial intelligence has become a hobgoblin of commencement talks—landing somewhere between cringe, out-of-touch, and offensive.
The reasons students react this way aren’t hard to trace. AI executives often market the technology by promising it can take over white-collar work. At the same time, the rise of AI has appeared to wipe out entire categories of entry-level jobs. Graduating into a future already crowded with warnings about sweeping economic transformation is. for many students. a heavy weight to carry.
But the jeering isn’t coming from people who are unfamiliar with AI. Universities have mostly failed to clamp down on large language models. Professors report being overrun by AI-assigned and cheating in their classrooms. Token usage trackers—from at least last year—suggest models experience an overall ‘bump’ during the school year.
Even Princeton University, long defined by a stringent academic honor code, has changed course. Princeton is now moving to require proctored exams for the first time in a century, largely because of AI.
That contradiction—students using the technology constantly while also turning against it in public—has frustrated some observers. The backlash. the argument runs. can’t be dismissed as fear from people who don’t use AI or even from people who don’t find it useful. Young people—including college graduates—use AI plenty. They’re also the most likely to think it’s bad.
Polls of Americans reinforce the unease: even as AI usage has been going up, people’s views on the technology have been souring.
The confrontations at graduation aren’t just about what speakers say. They’re about what students hear underneath it—whether AI is going to make their lives better, or upend them. Winning people over by pointing to “many worthwhile applications” is proving insufficient when the conversation. at the most public and personal moment of the year. inevitably turns to a broader question: how AI will reshape society.
And the deeper worry follows from the same evidence. For now, there’s still a line between user experience and societal welfare. Awed by convenience, people can remain unconvinced about the world it’s building. The loudest jeers at these ceremonies are a signal that. for many graduates. the future they’re being handed doesn’t feel like something to celebrate yet—especially not when AI shows up as the punchline.
graduation speakers artificial intelligence AI Eric Schmidt Gloria Caulfield Scott Borchetta University of Central Florida University of Arizona Middle Tennessee State University Glendale Community College Princeton University proctored exams AI cheating jobs