A piece of advice if you are giving a commencement speech this year: Do not talk to the kids about AI. That’s like talking up the coal mines to kids in the 1840s. They just don’t want to hear about how great the miserable future you’ve made for them is going to be from the people responsible for making it so bad.
Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, found this out the hard way while speaking to a group of graduates at the University of Central Florida. During her commencement speech, she told the group, “Let’s face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.”
That was met with a wave of boos from the crowd of kids getting ready to enter the workforce. Caulfield acknowledged that the message wasn’t being well received, saying, “Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?” That was greeted by a very clear message from someone in the crowd shouting, “AI sucks!” She attempted to resume her speech, saying, “Only five years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives.” That got cheers and a round of applause. The kids yearn for an AI-free time.
Shocker. Graduates dont love AI as much as the boomers using it to replace their jobs. pic.twitter.com/mQWk3eMqJK
— LeisureTime TV (@Leisure_TimeTV) May 10, 2026
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang had a little better luck while speaking to the 128th graduating class of Carnegie Mellon University. He came to spread the good word of AI, which he said started right in the very halls where they conducted their own studies, and told the graduates they were entering into “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation’s capacity to build,” according to The Next Web.
He also told them, “No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools—or greater opportunities—than you,” per Axios. “We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don’t walk.”
Not sure that one is going to hit quite the way it is intended to, given that most young folks are pretty pessimistic about the future that has been left for them. Gallup recently found that America ranked 87th out of 141 countries for the percentage of younger adults saying it was a good time to find a job. An AP-NORC poll from April found that eight in 10 adults under the age of 35 describe the US economy as very or somewhat poor. That’s the demographic of people that Huang is telling have more opportunities than anyone before them.
Read the room, man.
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