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Students Keep Booing AI During Commencement Speeches, and Honestly, They Might Be Right

After years of being told the future belongs to AI and automation, students seem less than thrilled to hear it at commencement.

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It’s commencement speech season, and colleges across the country have trotted out one miserable, AI brain-rotted business loser after another so they can inevitably sing the praises of AI, their words getting drowned out by a spontaneous chorus of boos belted out from the crowd of young graduates who viscerally despise the technology. They know how thoroughly it’s ruining their generation, their brains, their job prospects, and their futures.

The speakers try to muscle through it in a way that you know is giving a gaggle of tech bro losers over at Twitter/X a giant boner as they probably think these old, deeply unpopular AI brain-rotted business idiots are just as heroic as any civil rights icon from the 1960s.

What’s hysterical about it isn’t that it’s happened once, but several times in the past week alone. Rather than take the stage and fight in the name of the younger generation that’s getting squeezed out in the name of a technology that they don’t want, that almost nobody wants, they fight for the tech and not the people. It’s all just so sad, so miserable.

As I was writing this, Drew Magary over at Defector published an essay about all this in which he said, “From what I can tell, these people are pitching AI solely on its future omnipresence, rather than its ability to actually do anything beneficial for everyday people.”

He is correct. So was Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré when she wrote about the latest escalation in the disastrous incorporation of AI junk, this time into a college graduation ceremony, when the president of Glendale Community College near Phoenix, Arizona, was showered with boos when........

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