Why College Students Are Booing AI

College students have been booing commencement speakers who dare to mention artificial intelligence. The boos were heard at the University of Central Florida, when Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, called AI “the next Industrial Revolution.” And at the University of Arizona, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned “the architects of artificial intelligence,” last year’s Time people of the year. And also at Middle Tennessee State University, when Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record executive, told graduates that AI is “rewriting the production process.” Boos, audible enough to be captured on video.Those videos spread quickly on social media. The posts first cited the fact of the booing, which is undeniable. As that fact spread, others drew conclusions. NBC News reported that the term artificial intelligence proved “wildly unpopular” because it was “striking a sore spot.” The Wall Street Journal cited the boos as evidence that “The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam.” Fox News said the boos against Schmidt represented grads letting Schmidt know “exactly what they thought of AI.”Watching the clips, and then the reactions, and then reading stories about the reactions, and then taking in blog-style, big-idea conclusions about what the reactions meant, I felt the internet drawing me toward an interpretation that was supposed to be obvious—that young people loathe AI, and that they hate AI because it and the power brokers who invented, wield, and praise it have stolen from them the last vestige of a future that those brokers had already stolen in large part before they did so by means of AI.[Read: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing?]But as a university professor and administrator, I also know that new graduates by and large love AI. The technology has already changed college students forever, I wrote at the start of this academic year. My colleague Lila Shroff and I discussed how AI had broken high school