If you were to give a commencement speech in 2026, you probably wouldn’t mention artificial intelligence

It’s graduation season at American universities — and this year, at least two speakers are discovering that it’s hard to get graduating students excited about the future shaped by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at Tavistock Developments, He spoke at the University of Central Florida Recognizing that we live in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “disheartening.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield announced, prompting students in the audience to boo, their voices getting louder and louder until Caulfield laughed, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”

“Well, you struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Just a few years ago, AI wasn’t a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted by the audience again, this time with their loud cheers and applause.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he spoke about artificial intelligence in a speech at the University of Arizona on Friday.

In Schmidt’s case, the opposition actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups Demanding his removal from the position of official spokesman because of A lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) local news report, The booing started even before Schmidt took the stage.

But Schmidt too I got booed loudly When he told the students: “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was so persistent that Schmidt tried to talk it out, insisting that “you can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts you can’t do alone. When someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat, you just get on.”

Let’s be clear, AI is not going to become the third line all Graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently He spoke at Carnegie Mellon University’s graduation ceremonyHe didn’t seem to receive any vocal opposition when he said that AI had “reinvented computing.”

However, it is not entirely surprising to find some students in a booing mood. in Recent Gallup PollOnly 43% of Americans ages 15-34 said it was a good time to find a job locally, a sharp decline from 75% in 2022.

This pessimism is not merely a response to the rise of artificial intelligence (a shift that… Even those in the tech industry are worried), but he is a journalist and critic of the technology industry Suggested by Brian Merchant And that artificial intelligence has become “the new cruel face of hyper-capitalism.”

“I, too, would be loudly deploring the prospect of this coming industrial revolution if I were in my early 20s, unemployed, and had greater aspirations for my future than simply pursuing an LLM,” Merchant wrote.

Even when speeches do not explicitly mention AI, “resilience.” It was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself I confess And that there is “a fear in your generation that the future is already written, that machines are coming, that jobs are evaporating, that the climate is collapsing, that politics is fractured, that you are inheriting a mess you did not create.”

At the same time, Caulfield may have misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield was already losing them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.

Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, He told the New York Times“It wasn’t one person who really started booing. It was more like a group going, ‘This sucks.'”