Commencement speakers get negative reaction for citing AI

Independent, UK -   From coast to coast, commencement speakers have faced an audience of booing graduates each time they bring up artificial intelligence.

The boos came when music executive Scott Borchetta told the grads at Middle Tennessee State University, “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.” The capped-and-gowned University of Central Florida crowd jeered when real estate executive Gloria Caulfield called AI the “next industrial revolution.”

But no one got it worse than former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose May 15 speech at the University of Arizona was booed, nearly without interruption, for minutes on end.

“It was honestly one of the most surreal experiences,” Bailey Ekstrom, 21, an economics and political science graduate who was in the crowd, told The Independent. She had never seen campus opinion so unified, a mini-referendum suggesting the generation inheriting the post-AI world isn’t all that thrilled about it.