At college commencements across the U.S. this spring, a strange new ritual emerged: mention AI, and you might get booed. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was heckled at the University of Arizona after telling graduates that AI would touch “every profession, every classroom, every home,” and similar reactions followed at other ceremonies when speakers framed AI as the next industrial revolution or as an unavoidable new order. The Ritual of Rejection It would be easy to read those clips as a simple rejection of technology. But, young people are not turning away from AI in practice. They are using it heavily for schoolwork, search, summarization, creativity, and, increasingly, news. What they are rejecting is something narrower: institutional hype and a tone-deaf insistence that they should celebrate the very systems that seem to be shrinking their runway into the job world. The Usage Data Tells a Different Story Pew Research’s latest survey shows how deeply AI is already embedded in teen life. About two-thirds of U.S. teens say they use AI chatbots, and 57% use them to search for information while 54% use them for schoolwork. Around half use them for fun or entertainment, and meaningful minorities use them to summarize media, create images or videos, get news, or even seek conversation and emotional support. Reuters and other recent coverage suggest that among young adults, usage is even more normalized, especially as AI becomes folded into study habits, job applications, and everyday digital workflows. Mandatory, Transformative, and Career-Ending — All at Once And yet, the more integrated AI becomes in young people’s lives, the more ambivalent many of them seem to feel about it. This reflects the reality of a generation being told, all at once, that AI is mandatory, transformative, and potentially career-ending. The same systems they are expected to master for homework and work readiness are also being pitched by executives as replacements for entry-level labor. What the Numbers Actually Show That anxiety is showing up not only in surveys, but in public rituals. Axios reports that 42% of Gen Z in the Axios Harris poll believe AI will hurt job opportunities and wages for their generation, while the Associated Press cites polling showing around 70% of college students view AI as a threat to their career prospects. When commencement speakers deliver cheerful “embrace the future” lines to students graduating into that mood, the dissonance can be immediate and loud. It’s the Tone, Not the Topic Still, the backlash is not universal. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke about AI at Carnegie Mellon and was not booed; instead, his remarks took on a more constructive tone because they acknowledged students’ anxiety and framed AI as a tool they needed to learn rather than as a force that would simply sweep over them. This photo captures the crowd’s reaction to Huang. Yann LeCun, who spoke at NYU’s engineering graduation, noted in a LinkedIn thread that when he talked about AI he was cheered, not booed. That suggests students are not rejecting every technical discussion of AI. They are reacting to tone, context, and whether the speaker sounds like they are actually listening. The Ladder That Got Pulled Up The boos did not come from nowhere. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told a March conference audience that new-college-graduate unemployment could hit 30% within two years as AI absorbs entry-level white-collar work. The Dallas Federal Reserve found the unemployment gap between entry-level and experienced workers had widened sharply in occupations exposed to AI substitution. Anthropic’s CEO has publicly forecast that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs The Youth Reaction A TikTok thread about the boos garnered a lot of discussion from teens and graduates. Pulling some of the reactions from the TikTok users on the thread, here is a compilation of what the young respondents had to say: “Anna”, a TikTok user, cut through the media framing in seven words: “It’s NOT fear. It’s frustration, anger and disgust.” Jo landed the sharpest irony of the entire debate: “’It’s a tool’ — that students get failed for using.” “Kelso” pushed back on the press coverage directly: “It shouldn’t really be reduced to ‘being a trend.’ This is a case of people showing and expressing their actual real life emotions. They are booing out of authenticity, not because they are participating in a trend.” C cubed named the economic logic underneath it: “The boos are because AI is not being used to benefit workers by alleviating conditions — but used to replace workers. Streamlining efficiency really means layoffs.” Tommy Joe went furthest: “It’s not even AI that bothers me. It’s the smugness. Because none of these people built it alone. Thousands of engineers, coders, thinkers, and workers gave them the kingdom they’re standing on.” Those comments are not outliers. They are the survey data with the filter removed. The “kids hate AI” framing, while catchy, is too blunt. What comes through in the threads, the polling, and the commencement footage is not blanket rejection. These are people who use AI daily, who are learning to build with it, who depend on it for schoolwork and job applications. What they hate is the packaging: hype without accountability, convenience without consent, productivity without a social contract. Employers still say they need talent. But the demand is concentrated in execution-heavy roles in controls, integration, and systems deployment, not the broad entry-level positions fresh graduates trained for. From where a new grad is standing, that looks less like a revolution and more like a bait-and-switch: train for the future, arrive to find the entry ramps have quietly narrowed. The European Perspective My fellow creator, the talented Kevin O’Donovan, commented to me: “... at Hannover Messe a couple of weeks back, this came up in a number of conversations with people I was out and about with. There’s a real conundrum here. On one hand, there is clearly a skilled worker shortage. On the other, some entry-level recruitment seems to be slowing down because companies are asking, “Can AI do some of this?”But that creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Where do you get the new blood, and how do you develop them to be skilled in the future?” Infrastructure That Has to Earn It The commencement backlash is less a rejection of AI than a reaction to the way it is being presented. The students booing in Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee are not outside the technology ecosystem. They are already using these systems every day for school, research, creativity, and work. But they are also graduating into an economy where many entry-level pathways suddenly feel unstable, narrowed, or uncertain. That helps explain why some speakers were booed while others were applauded. Ro Khanna at Suffolk University, Jensen Huang at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Wozniak at Grand Valley State all acknowledged the anxiety in the room instead of talking past it. The response students seem to want is not blind optimism or blanket reassurance. It is honesty. The Class of 2026 is not rejecting technology. If anything, this may be the most AI-literate graduating class yet. What they appear to be rejecting is the idea that they should celebrate disruption without being allowed to question who benefits from it, who absorbs the cost, and what happens to the people trying to enter the workforce as the ground shifts beneath them. Additional Resources for Inquisitive Minds * The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It – The Verge Explores the “power user but s… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dianawolftorres.substack.com
