As commencement ceremonies unfold this year, speeches addressing the implications of artificial intelligence are proving to be a divisive topic among graduating students.
Gloria Caulfield, an executive at Tavistock Development Company, spoke at the University of Central Florida last week about the “profound change” in our times, which she described as both “exciting” and “daunting.”
Caulfield remarked, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” which elicited boos from the crowd. The noise intensified until Caulfield smiled and inquired of her fellow speakers, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord,” she noted, before attempting to continue her remarks. When she said, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” she was met with cheers and applause from the audience.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, faced a similar backlash during his speech at the University of Arizona on Friday.
Before even beginning his address, Schmidt was met with criticism from student groups, who sought to have him removed as the speaker due to allegations of sexual assault from a former girlfriend and business partner—a claim he has denied. Reports indicate that boos started even before he took the stage.
As he urged students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence,” the crowd booed relentlessly. Schmidt tried to overcome the dissent, stating, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”
However, not every graduation speech has faced such resistance regarding AI. At Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned that AI has “reinvented computing” without any noticeable objections.
Student reactions reflect a broader climate of pessimism. A recent Gallup poll revealed that only 43% of young Americans aged 15 to 34 believe it’s a good time to find a job, a stark decline from 75% just a year prior.
This concern isn’t entirely due to the rise of AI; as journalist Brian Merchant articulated, AI embodies “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism” for many students.
Merchant remarked, “I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM.”
Even speeches that didn’t explicitly mention AI often emphasized resilience. Schmidt admitted, “there is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”
Caulfield may have misjudged her audience of arts and humanities graduates. Some students felt her praise for corporate figures like Jeff Bezos was “generic” and uninspiring.
Graduate Alexander Rose Tyson expressed to The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”
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These developments highlight a generational divide regarding the future shaped by AI. The pushback from graduates suggests a deeper anxiety about job security and the socio-economic landscape, revealing heightened awareness and resistance among young people toward technologies that might redefine their futures.
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