Advice for 2026 commencement speakers: Don’t bring up AI
Graduates at multiple U.S. college commencement ceremonies booed when speakers brought up artificial intelligence, NPR reported May 20, illustrating how quickly AI has become a flashpoint among some students. In at least one case, a school’s use of an AI system during the event added to the friction, NPR said. The result, NPR reported, was a message aimed not at AI’s general role but at how and when it gets introduced—sometimes with consequences as immediate as an audience reaction.
At Glendale Community College near Phoenix, the ceremony “hit a snag just as students were walking across the stage to get their diplomas,” NPR reported. NPR said the “wrong names were being read aloud at the ceremony,” and that “some of the graduates’ names didn’t even get read.” In an effort to explain what happened, the college’s president, Tiffany Hernandez, told the audience that the school was “using a new AI system as our reader,” and NPR reported that the remarks were met with loud boos.
NPR said Glendale Community College later blamed the issue on technical problems and apologized to students for the experience. The episode stood out in the NPR reporting because it linked AI not only to discussion by speakers, but also to an automated function in the ceremony itself—one in which errors directly affected students on stage.
NPR reported that other commencement speakers who discussed sweeping changes tied to artificial intelligence have also faced boos from the Class of 2026. At the University of Central Florida on May 8, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described AI to the graduating class as “the next industrial revolution,” NPR said. NPR reported that boos started “almost immediately” after she spoke, and that Caulfield responded, “OK, I struck a chord.”
At Middle Tennessee State University on May 9, NPR reported, record executive Scott Borchetta told graduates that “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” NPR said the booing continued as he responded, first saying, “Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool,” and then adding, “Then do something about it. It’s a tool. Make it work for you.”
NPR also reported repeated boos at a University of Arizona commencement on May 15, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke to graduates. NPR said the booing happened “including when he said,” “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
The NPR report put the students’ reactions in the context of how these technologies have already entered their education and daily lives. NPR said ChatGPT was released in 2022, when many of this year’s undergraduates were “just starting college,” and that the students’ experiences have shaped how they view AI—whether they embrace it for tasks or use it dishonestly, as well as how they interpret its broader effects.
Maggie Simmons, who NPR reported will attend her own graduation at the University of Denver next month, told NPR she believed her first instinct would have been to boo in the crowd. Simmons, NPR said, expressed concern that AI is harming the planet and affecting Black and minority communities, and she said language models “have been found to reinforce systemic racism.” She also pointed to the power-hungry infrastructure behind AI systems, telling NPR that data centers needed to power AI have had “a disproportionate impact on minority neighborhoods.”
Simmons said she wants graduates recognized for their work rather than overshadowed by AI’s promise or risks, telling NPR, “The future should be these people in this room that are earning their degree and now going out into the workforce,” and adding, “We should be celebrating them and their brains, not some artificial intelligence that in the future is going to take their jobs and especially without regulation.”
Kareen Gill, a recent American University graduate with a political science degree, told NPR she sees generational pessimism that has shifted from early excitement about AI tools to concern about job prospects. NPR reported Gill saying that at the beginning, AI seemed like “this cool thing, ‘Oh, I can write an essay for you,’” but now, she said, her generation “doesn’t want that anymore,” and doesn’t want AI “messing with our job prospects” or undermining opportunities built over “hard for four years” of preparation.
Gill told NPR she has noticed an immediate effect in fewer internships and entry-level jobs that involve tasks such as “answering phones,” which she said AI is replacing. She said, “So we’re seeing that firsthand and we’re seeing how much it’s disadvantaging us,” and she argued that the consequences could land differently for older generations. She added, “But I don’t think that older generations are necessarily in our shoes in that way,” saying it is “not really going to impact their future on the rest of their adulthood in the same way.”
NPR linked those concerns to polling that suggests generational differences in how Americans assess AI’s job impact. NPR reported that a March Quinnipiac University poll found that “Gen Z, despite being more familiar with AI, is the most pessimistic about jobs,” with “81% saying that AI will decrease job opportunities.” NPR said Chetan Jaiswal, an associate professor of computer science at Quinnipiac who worked on the poll, said the results showed Americans overall have become “more concerned and less excited about AI as the technology’s impacts are becoming more evident,” adding, “People are not rejecting AI, but people are asking questions now since the initial AI fever is gone.”
The NPR report also said Gill echoed the idea that worries go beyond first jobs and into broader consequences. Gill told NPR that AI’s effects on wealth and the environment—what she described as “how they’re making billionaires richer and depleting our environment”—have “really opened our eyes to the ripple effects of AI.” NPR added that Quinnipiac’s poll found only 5% of Americans think AI development is led by groups that represent their interests, underscoring how students’ reactions may connect to a wider question of trust and accountability.
Correction: An earlier version of the NPR report misspelled Scott Borchetta’s last name.