The script

It's been a rough month for AI at commencement.

Three different speakers got booed for saying essentially the same thing. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, took the worst of it. He stood at the University of Arizona last Friday and told graduates that AI "will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory." The booing started before he finished. He tried to keep going — If you'd let me make this point, please — and the second wave came in louder.

A week earlier, a real-estate executive named Gloria Caulfield used the phrase "the next industrial revolution" at Central Florida and got the same treatment. The week before that, country-music label founder Scott Borchetta told Middle Tennessee State, Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool. Boos. By the time TechCrunch got to it, the headline was: If you're giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don't mention AI.

A graduate at Arizona summed it up to a reporter afterward: It wasn't one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, "this sucks."

The easy read is that a generation has turned against AI. But the same kids doing the booing have ChatGPT open in another tab right now. They wrote essays with it through college. They use it at work. Some of them are watching the job they trained for disappear into it. They've made peace with the technology — they had to.

What they're refusing is being told.

The speeches all had the same shape. This is happening, it's good for you, you don't have a say but please feel empowered. "It's a tool, deal with it." "It will touch every classroom." "You will help shape it." Middle-aged people with money walking on stage and explaining to twenty-two-year-olds without it that the future has been decided, and they should be excited about that.

The line that drew the loudest boo at Arizona is the tell. Schmidt — trying to be empathetic — said: there is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written. He meant it kindly. He was naming what he could see in the room. But the sentence does what it says. A man who'd already finished writing his life was up there telling them theirs was done, and they heard it.

Not every speech went this way, which is worth sitting with. The same week, Jensen Huang gave a more or less identical talk at Carnegie Mellon — AI as "reinvented computing" — and got applause. But that audience was engineering grads. They'd cast their vote back when they picked the major. You can't be told something you already decided.

So I don't think the booing is about the technology. For three years the people on the stages have been narrating the same arc — the model is here, progress is non-negotiable, enthusiasm is the only acceptable response — and the people in the seats have been listening politely. Somewhere in this commencement season they stopped.

Nobody booing has a counter-proposal. There's no movement here, at least not yet, and a boo is about the cheapest political act there is. But notice what the graduate said sucked. Not the tool. Not even the future. The script.

I don't know what follows from this. Probably nothing visible for a while — graduates boo, and then they go get jobs, many of them jobs that involve the very thing they were booing. But it's the first time I've watched an audience talk back to the script in public, and I doubt it's the last.