Something Strange Is Happening at College Graduations Across the Country. It’s Causing Shocking Outbursts—and for Good Reasons. - Slate

Follow Nitish Signed Up For Email Alerts Error Signing Up For Email Alerts Close Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nitish Pahwa? Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. It’s graduation season, so you know what that means: a lotta commencement speeches from wealthy figures of renown—all directed to debt-burdened, half-asleep, cap-and-gown-clad graduates worried about the frozen job market awaiting them. These grads are also primed to boo any speakers who so much as mutter the words artificial intelligence. The first viral demonstration of this occurred earlier this month at the University of Central Florida, where Gloria Caulfield—a vice president for the real estate firm Tavistock Development Company—addressed a ceremony for arts and humanities and communications grads. Just a few minutes into her speech, Caulfield began warning of “profound change” to come. “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution,” she said. The boos began, swelling in volume so rapidly that Caufield wondered aloud, “What happened?,” before earning some subsequent applause for making the observation that “only a few years ago, A.I. was not a factor in our lives.” But the jeers returned once she noted that “A.I. capabilities are in the palm of our hands.” Caulfield may have been the first to see her A.I. remarks hit the social media circuit, but she wouldn’t be alone. On May 10, Big Machine Records CEO and Taylor Swift discoverer Scott Borchetta closed out graduation week at Middle Tennessee State University with a speech in which he compared A.I. to “a fine instrument, unopened, still sitting in its case” and pointed out that the software is “rewriting production as we sit here.” (Fact check: true.) That elicited plenty of interjections from the degree-holders below his lectern, to whom Borchetta responded, “Deal with it.” Last Friday, the screams also came for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the University of Arizona and mentioned Time magazine’s “Architects of AI” tribute issue, which brought out a lengthy, vocal crowd dissent that continued throughout much of Schmidt’s A.I. tangent. The very same day, at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, an “A.I. announcer” messed up the pronunciation and order of several graduates’ names as they walked the stage, forcing administrators to pause the event and redo the whole thing with a flesh-and-blood name reader. I don’t think the timing and virality of these moments, in this season, is coincidental. The fact is, these undergrads and grad-schoolers have had years to assess the impact of A.I. on their lives and prospects; many of the students in the Class of 2026 got to campus just as ChatGPT took A.I. mainstream in the fall of 2022. By now, they’ve been bludgeoned nonstop with A.I. promotions across social media, TV, and their own academic departments. They’ve seen enough of the tech’s deleterious impacts—on the job market, their hometowns, the climate, the basic concepts of critical thinking and social trust and shared reality—that the supposed benefits promised by the boosters no longer seem in reach. They’re mighty upset about all of that, and they’re letting out that anger at a moment of maximum catharsis: when they’re just about to leave academia, but have to deal with one more stuffy A.I. adult along that path. The golden promise of A.I.’s boosters has been pushed hard in public: an automated utopia free of grunt work and stress, thanks to this ingenious software that will cure cancers and empower individuals to reshape the world as they’d like it. That, to put it lightly, is not what many of these students have seen, and they reasonably do not appear to think that will come to pass. For a whole generation of campus protesters, A.I. symbolizes drones in Gaza; for soon-to-be job-seekers, it means a bunch of bias-laden algorithms and virtual likenesses interviewing them for whatever entry-level gigs actually still exist, or for awful gig work in content moderation; for women and transgender students especially, it’s often meant creeps with smart glasses who may put their clandestine snapshots through automatic deepfake-porn processors; and for STEM pupils of conscience, working in A.I. (if they can even land a steady job in the field) portends resigning oneself to an inevitable gig with some red-pilled and plainly unethical bros, whether Elon Musk or Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Palmer Luckey, before they inevitably get laid off. Obviously, none of that means this is a universal sentiment within university bodies. Outside of a few exceptions, substantial shares of college students in all disciplines have copped to ChatGPT-ing their way through school. And in the recent past, there have been plenty of other A.I.-inflected ceremonies that proceeded without disruption, even as a few others elicited some outrage. But recent studies from eminent pollsters (Gallup, Quinnipiac, the Sine Institute) show the same result over and over again: Our young scholars increasingly view A.I. as a future impediment to their future welfare, more a necessary evil that exists and has to be dealt with than another tool that supercharges their productivity. Ironically, someone who does seem to understand all this is notorious A.I. booster Eric Schmidt himself, who assured the disgruntled graduate audience of his sympathy after he rattled off a bit on how artificial intelligence will soon be everywhere, from hospitals to personal relationships. “I know what many of you are feeling about that—I can hear you,” he added as the boos escalated. “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.” Yeah, that just about sums it up. Naturally, Schmidt pivoted by telling the kids they just need to take control and redirect all these world-defining shifts on their own. Easy-peasy! (This type of perfunctory philosophizing is par for the course with Schmidt, who in 2024 declared that humans would never patch up the “breaking” climate and that he’d “rather bet on A.I. solving the problem than constraining it.”) There is, at least, one other high-level executive who does seem to get it, and to whom college grads have responded very positively. Just this week, Delta CEO Ed Bastian admitted to Emory University’s grads in Atlanta that he did use generative A.I. to draft his speech—only to scrap the apps when “the lack of soul or warmth” from their output became clear. That redemption arc was met with rapturous applause. It turns out that young Americans still appreciate it when a figure of authority advocates for the human touch.