Chances are, you have heard of/seen various viral clips of commencement speakers talking about AI getting booed by the graduating students. If you’re anything like me, you have also read various social media posts and many other commentaries about what this all means; here are several different recent examples of the sorts of things I’ve been reading.
I have three brief and not-so-original thoughts about all this.
First, students don’t all of a sudden “hate” AI; rather, their feelings about AI are complex and contradictory, just like they are for me and pretty much everyone else who has thought about AI for more than 15 minutes. Well, everyone other than tech bro AI evangelists and/or the rich already types who give commencement speeches like this. I have never thought “hardcore use AI to do 90% of the work” cheating is as common as MSM wants us to believe, but students all use AI in ways I have no problems with, though sometimes I think they might drift into the grey areas of cheating. The students in first-year writing tend to be more positive about AI than the juniors, seniors, and MA students I have in upper-level courses, which might also reflect why graduating students might be more inclined to boo. After all, the freshmen in an annoying gen ed composition class might see AI as a great short cut for getting through something they don’t really want to do in the first place, while the students who are graduating and who have been looking at a dismal job market and hearing more and more about how AI is threatening to make their degrees irrelevant have a good reason to boo. But I think a lot of those graduating students have the same attitudes about social media as well: they hate it, but they also can’t quit it, either.
Again, I feel the same way. I don’t want students to use AI to cheat their way through college (generally, and in my classes in particular), but look, I use AI too, and in ways I suspect is pretty common among students as well. I don’t like the data centers springing up around me here in SE Michigan, but I also think the harms are exaggerated, and it hasn’t stopped me from using Claude to brainstorm, to proofread, and to even suggest a sentence or a paragraph or more when I’m stuck on something, particularly some sort of bureaucratic busywork task.
Second, students weren’t booing AI; they were booing the billionaire commencement speakers cheerfully telling young people about to start their adult lives and careers that the future is not them but AI, an emerging technology that is going to make that smiling billionaire even richer, and there’s nothing today’s graduates can do about it. That is definitely the general impression I got from most of my students in the Writing, Rhetoric, and AI course I taught last year. Their attitudes about AI in general were all over the map. Some students remained adamant AI refusers to the end, some students started and remained AI enthusiasts, and most students began and ended somewhere in-between.
My goal for the class wasn’t about convincing students to use or not use AI; rather, my goal was for students to leave the class skeptical about AI, regardless of how they did (or didn’t) use it. I want students (and everyone else) to presume that AI’s output will have to be fact-checked, to not be sucked in by AI’s sycophancy, to never forget AI has no more understanding of the world around it than a toaster, to never trust the puffed up claims of AI’s capabilities, and, above all else, to never forget that all of this is unregulated and unequally enriching a few few people in Silicon Valley, and really REALLY enriching the likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump. I don’t know how successful I was on all these points, but none of my students like any of these technologarchy dudes who are palling around with Trump, and I’ve never had a student disagree with any of the readings or discussions we’ve had about the need for AI regulation.
And third, to quote Barack Obama’s famous line, don’t boo, vote. The only way the government will finally regulate AI (and let’s add social media to that list while we’re at it) is if it becomes a campaign issue. And frankly, I think that these boos and the subsequent viral videos and MSM coverage suggest to me it very well may be a campaign issue in 2026. I’m almost certain it will be in 2028.
I don’t know how likely it is for this to boost turnout or not, since young people still don’t show up at the polls as much as they should, but maybe this is something that will get recent grads and current students out in November. Michelle Goldberg’s Op-Ed “Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers” (she and I are more or less making the same argument) also includes a link to the more complete version of the recent May 2026 Times/Siena National Poll of Registered Voters, and if you dig through that data a bit, there are signs of what might be (hopefully) coming. 62% of 18-29 year olds say that if the election for Congress were held now, they would vote for the generic Democratic candidate. 60% “strongly disapprove” of Donald Trump, and 47% think that AI is “mostly bad,” both of which are larger percentages than any other demographic. 1
Let’s see if anyone remembers these boos in November, but I am hoping that this is helps get more people to pay attention to AI and to recognize how citizens can still do something about it.
- Not that the politics of AI split neatly along partisan lines. One of the reasons why Michigan is getting a lot of data centers built in it right now is our Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is all for it. And on the right, you’ve got people like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Beck all raising various objections about AI. ↩︎