It’s graduation season across American universities, and this year, at least a few speakers have learned how difficult it is to get students excited about a future dominated by artificial intelligence. Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at the real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, delivered a speech at the University of Central Florida where she acknowledged that we’re living through a period of “profound change”—one that’s both “exciting” and “daunting.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared. That remark prompted the students in the audience to start booing, the noise growing louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”

“Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then attempted to continue her speech, noting, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives”—only to be interrupted again, this time by loud cheers and applause from the crowd.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar reaction when he brought up AI during a speech at the University of Arizona on Friday. In Schmidt’s case, the pushback started even before the event, with several student groups calling for his removal as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused him of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage. But he also received loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was so persistent that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”

To be clear, AI isn’t becoming a taboo topic at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to face any audible pushback when he said that AI has “reinvented computing.”

Still, it’s not surprising that some students are in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a local job—a steep drop from 75% in 2022. That pessimism isn’t just a reaction to the rise of AI (a shift that even tech industry workers are worried about), but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested that AI has become “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”

“I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM,” Merchant wrote. Even when the speeches didn’t mention AI explicitly, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that there is “a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

Caulfield, meanwhile, might have also misjudged her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that even before she mentioned AI, Caulfield had already started to lose them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos. Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”