The commencement season has arrived, and some speakers are finding it challenging to inspire enthusiasm about a future influenced by artificial intelligence among graduating students.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at Tavistock Development Company, delivered a speech at the University of Central Florida, noting our current era of “profound change,” which she described as both “exciting” and “daunting.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield stated, which led to boos from the students, growing louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord,” she remarked. She attempted to resume her speech, pointing out, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” only to be interrupted again by the audience with cheers and applause.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt encountered a similar reaction when he mentioned AI during a speech at the University of Arizona.
In Schmidt’s case, the backlash began even before his speech, with some student groups calling for his removal as the commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former partner accused him of sexual assault. (He denied the allegations.) Reports indicate the booing began even before Schmidt reached the stage.
Schmidt received further boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough for Schmidt to try speaking over it, asserting, “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, AI isn’t a controversial subject at all graduation ceremonies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement without any audible criticism, even as he claimed AI has “reinvented computing.”
Nonetheless, some student discontent is not surprising. A recent Gallup poll showed only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 believe it’s a good time to find a job locally, a significant decline from 75% in 2022.
This pessimism isn’t solely a response to AI’s rise (a trend concerning even to tech workers), but as journalist and tech critic Brian Merchant suggested, for many students, AI represents “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”
“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,” Merchant wrote.
Even when speeches didn’t explicitly mention AI, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt acknowledged a “fear in your generation that the future has already been written, machines are coming, jobs are evaporating, the climate is breaking, politics are fractured, and you are inheriting a mess you did not create.”
Caulfield may have also misunderstood her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student noted she failed to engage them even before mentioning AI, with her “generic” praise of corporate figures like Jeff Bezos.
Alexander Rose Tyson, a graduate, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”