Over the last few weeks, graduating students across the country have met any reference to artificial intelligence with hearty, sustained boos. That included booing commencement speakers for talking glowingly about an AI-filled future, booing a college president after the AI system used to read names skipped students, and—according to an account provided by Microsoft President Brad Smith—it included students at Princeton rejecting jacket designs they believed were created with AI tools.
Smith heard the boos, ruminated on what the kids were telling him and others about how they feel about AI, and came to a conclusion: The kids are wrong. In response to what he called a “powerful wake-up call for the tech sector” from the generation entering the workforce, he penned a 3,000-word essay that those kids are definitely going to read over their summer break in order to get his milquetoast message of embracing change.
To start his essay, Smith offers the kind of introduction that will be familiar to any college student writing a paper a few hours before a deadline: an analogy that doesn’t really work if you think about it. “In 1838, the invention of the camera sparked predictions that photography would make artists obsolete,” he wrote. “Why would anyone pay an artist to slowly and laboriously paint a scene when a camera could do the job more accurately, more quickly, and at a lower cost?”
Now, if you follow his analogy, he is effectively positioning the students booing AI as the modern equivalent of the people claiming cameras will destroy art. So it makes it feel like he’s almost lamenting it when he writes that the overwhelming negative reactions from graduating classes toward AI are a reminder that “People will insist on having a say in deciding when and how AI is used.” Ugh, those pesky people getting in the way of progress.
There is one way to read the boos of students that goes something like: “We hate this technology. We hate that it’s destroyed the entry-level job market for us. We hate that you keep claiming that it has the same level of intelligence as we do after putting in years of hard work into our education. We hate the ‘art’ that comes out of it. We hate the way that it exacerbates the growing wealth inequality gap.”
Then there is the way Smith reads it. “Students and graduates recognize AI’s benefits. But they want to keep AI in its proper place,” he wrote. “The rejection of artificial fibers and artificial intelligence illustrates how human tastes shape market economics even as efficiency and productivity advance. Machines don’t buy products. People do.” Not clear that the students would like their message, blunt and straightforward as it is, boiled down to consumer behavior, but hey, Smith’s positioned himself as the Gen Z whisperer here.
Smith offers very little by way of suggestion that any of this will slow down. A reminder that earlier this year, another Microsoft executive said that AI would wipe out white-collar jobs within 18 months. Instead, he’s paid a minimal amount of lip service to the concerns of the next generation while saying, in many more words, “Get used to it.”
Even as he acknowledged the challenges 20-somethings face as they enter an extremely bad job market, calling it a “perfect storm,” his final message was effectively to not fight the waves. “Constant change has taught you how to adapt quickly. As AI reshapes how we work, you don’t need to unlearn decades of habits the way some of us do. You are better equipped to move forward,” he wrote. “Technology will change, but you can stand firmly and speak loudly for values that are timeless. Agency. Ambition. Dignity. All fulfilled through work and technology that gives us purpose.”
Basically: “We hear you. We aren’t going to do anything to address any of your concerns, but don’t you feel heard? And isn’t that all you actually want?” Perhaps a better piece of advice for the graduating class of 2026: Organize.
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