Why new grads are booing commencement speakers: There’s an ‘ambient anxiety that AI is going to make things dramatically worse’
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/new-graduates-booing-commencement-speakers-ai.html
Why new grads are booing commencement speakers: There’s an ‘ambient anxiety that AI is going to make things dramatically worse’
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/new-graduates-booing-commencement-speakers-ai.html
27 Comments
Boo as much as you want, downvote any positive AI post online, and upvote as many anti-AI post as you want. In the end, AI is a technology disruption, and every company is getting ahead of it. Every employee should be adapting.
It’s why I hate seeing all the gleeful linkedin cringe posts from AI bros like; “No more need for designers, writers, and filmmakers”, on a jobboard where designers, writers, and filmmakers are trying to find work. They’re so oblivious
I don’t blame them.
I remember when I graduated 20 years ago, running into that awful “2-3 years experience required, entry level salary paid” shit.
Now it seems to have become, “5-7 years experience required, entry level salary paid.” And this when degrees are scary expensive, alternatives aren’t much better, and prices have gone up.
And the objective is just straight up for growth, greed, and unsustainably so. Like, well beyond the Jack Welch level of short term spikes.
Exactly. These tech CEOs coming to their graduation and making fun of them? They are lucky they’re not tarred and feathered.
These commencement speakers just cannot read the room.
They keep turning a ceremony about how these people are graduating into fluff speeches about how AI is so great.
Like why the fuck are they even bringing it up?
“AI is going to take your job and make tech giants even richer” … that’s the message I’m hearing.
“This thing will eliminate your job, make weapons that kill people, and make you unable to afford electricity. Isn’t that awesome!”
“What are you doing? Wait don’t boo it why are you doing that?”
Do you think it’s because AI is going to make things dramatically worse?
AI will disrupt human employment. The worse thing to do is belive the creators of AI and their investors.
Next AI bro who wants to make a fucking speech can get shamed off the stage while we chant “EAT THE RICH”
why tf are these people even coming to give speeches just to shit on the students for even getting a degree, do they seriously think people will applaud them for getting insulted like that?
Imagine spending years working for a degree just to have some rich CEO stand on stage and tell you that AI is taking your future anyway. I don’t blame these kids at all for booing.
Regardless, it’s just so incredibly disrespectful to have a speaker come in and essentially tell these new graduates that all they’ve worked towards is useless. In a lot of ways I blame the schools. How hard is it to have a commencement speaker who isn’t shit? It doesn’t even have to be GOOD. This is not an address at the Washington Monument. Just yap for a bit about progress and hard work and hope for the future and building a better world. Such a softball. Meanwhile these speakers just HAVE to be assholes.
Examined generational anxiety surrounding AI’s impact on career viabilitythey just spent four years and six figures on a degree and the speaker is up there talking about how exciting AI is. i’d boo too
“Ambient anxiety” doesnt do it justice when surveys show 40% of executives have shifted hiring away from entry-level and junior roles by having middle and upper management take over some of the workload while AI takes on the repetitive tasks of those they fired or arent hiring.
# ‘AI is going to make things dramatically worse’
“going to”
It is making our lives worse _right now_.
The tech CEOs themselves are the ones saying how bad things are going to get for the average person. Are they surprised that people have a reaction to that?
I think it is good
American kids who are 22-23 today were born around 2003 and they have only ever seen things get worse. It’s become their expectation
Just goes to show how out of touch these CEO’s and Billionaire’s are.
Why is the question “Why are the grads booing” and not “Why are these fucking CEOs coming to these ceremonies and mocking the grads with their bullshit”?
Ai has already made things worse. People living near data centers are already sick
Those AI tech CEOs deserve to get boo’d.
To the tech execs, this is now just a necessary arm of the marketing campaign for AI. They know what they are doing to the workforce (and to people trying to enter it), and they are trying to sell it anyway.
They’ve spent their whole lives becoming nothing more than LLM chat bots themselves, existing in an echo chamber that rewards this sort of behavior.
In some ways, LLMs are more like them than most humans are.
The process of becoming a C level exec at these companies naturally filters out the kind of person who would put humanity and society above shareholder value.
>Why new grads are booing commencement speakers: There’s an ‘ambient anxiety that AI is going to make things dramatically worse’
Plus the commencement speakers are so out of touch that they choose to paint AI as some mega positive thing.
People are right: if the plutocrats are pushing it then the goal is to erode the power of their future serfs. AI will make our lives worse and is worthy of scorn.