A chorus of Gen Z graduation boos
Why commencement speakers are getting roasted by grads
You’ve probably seen the videos of college grads booing commencement speakers talking about AI this week.
We’ve known for a while that Gen Z is AI anxious — and that their relationship to AI is nuanced. They love to hate it, hate to love it.
In many ways, young adults feel they are once again guinea pigs in a big experiment they didn’t sign up for, but will inevitably deal with the consequences of (smart phones, social media, Covid-19 mark a few other recent examples).
But what’s happening here is new. Unlike with smart phones and social media, Gen Z is being told how they’re supposed to feel about AI and how it’s going to take over their entire lives. And they are sick of it. Condescension is this generation’s least favorite language. And they’ve already heard enough from AI creators about how it will impact them.
Look beyond the boos and you’ll see there’s even more going on here.
Gen Z’s relationship to AI is driven by FOMO.
Time after time, young people tell me that they use AI not because they want to, but because they feel like they have to. These speakers’ AI references are hitting that nerve.
In one of my earliest AI-focused listening sessions at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, a then-college junior shared the following:
“I wish AI didn’t exist. I had an interview with a company and they sent me an assignment for it, and I had to do a bunch of press releases, social media posts. It was like, how you can do this, and it had a time limit. It was completely at home, they weren’t watching me doing anything. And I finished it, turned it in, and then my friends were like, ‘You could you have looked stuff up?’ And I was like, ‘Honestly, yeah.’ And that’s kind of annoying because other candidates probably did. If they don’t have the moral compass I had to just be like, ‘Okay, I am in an interview. Nobody’s watching me, but I’m gonna do this all myself.’ But I was like, somebody can totally just copy this whole thing, put it into Chat[GPT] and do it, and then, like, beat me out of the spot. And so I was like, that’s kind of tough. So, stuff like that, where it’s like, people can pass you using a robot when you’re using your own brain.”
This dynamic has surfaced over and over — where young people forgo AI to take the ‘moral high ground’ only to get beat out by their peers who are using AI. And in the case of AI, the moral high ground has all but disappeared. When there are no rules at all, is there really any point in doing ‘the right thing?’ Or does it just make you a sucker?
Back to Gen Z’s AI FOMO, it’s reminiscent of the early social media days, except with one major caveat. Social media, at the get-go, felt fun. In many ways, it became a right of passage. AI doesn’t have that element.
And while Gen Z was socially native and digitally fluent, they are not AI native or fluent — but Gen Alpha will be.
Earlier this spring, we asked a group of young adults to reply to the following: “When I think about AI, the first feeling that comes to mind is…”
Here’s what they shared.