Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in the age of rapid change.

This week I am asking how badly we hate AI. Turns out, it's pretty bad.

May 2026 | Essay #81

At the University of Central Florida, a real estate executive named Gloria Caulfield told a room of arts and humanities graduates that the rise of artificial intelligence is "the next industrial revolution."

The crowd erupted in booing.

At the University of Arizona days later, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (a man who helped build internet), told ten thousand graduates that when someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you don't ask which seat, you just get on.

The angry boos came before he even finished the sentence.

These weren't isolated heckles. They were synchronized. A collective "this sucks," as one UCF graduate put it to the New York Times. And they are the most honest data point I've seen all year.

It's true. Most of us really hate AI.

Negative views of AI have risen from 34% to just over 50% in three years.

Half of American adults say the increased use of AI makes them more concerned than excited, and just 10% say they're more excited than concerned. Only 18% of people ages 14 to 29 say they feel hopeful about AI. Over 70% of Americans think the technology is advancing too fast. This is majority sentiment.

And the specific wound underneath it is jobs.

Not robots-stealing-your-soul philosophical anxiety. Practical, immediate, this graduating-class-anxiety. A Gallup poll found that only 43% of people aged 15 to 34 believe it's a good time to find a job locally down from 75% in 2022. Whether or not it's true that AI is stealing jobs is irrelevant. Our youth think that it is, and that's what's important here.

That's what was in the room with Eric Schmidt. Not a philosophical objection to technology. A generation staring at the specific people who built the systems now being marketed as replacements for their first jobs, being told to get on the rocket ship without being asked if they had a say in where it was going.

I can understand the frustration.

The framing. Both speakers acknowledged the fear.

Schmidt said it directly: "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."

That's a pretty honest thing to say at a graduation. And then he undermined it completely by immediately insisting that AI is inevitable, that the rocket ship is here, that the only question is whether you get on.

You cannot tell someone their fear is rational and then hand them a brochure for the thing they're afraid of. That's not comfort. That's condescension dressed as optimism.

The students weren't booing the technology. They were booing the posture, the assumption that their job is to adapt to a future being designed without them, by people who won't be personally affected by it.

The booing was a refusal to be passengers.

What do we actually do about this? I don't know, and we all need to figure out how best we can move forward.

First, we have to stop conflating AI literacy with AI cheerleading. They are not the same thing. You must learn to understand that cars can run you over, that you shouldn't play with guns, and you need to be AI literate to boot. Uncomfortable but necessary.

Second, universities need to teach career adaptability, not just tool familiarity. The antidote isn't more AI demos. It's agency.

Help students understand the landscape and engage with it, the actual risk distribution across roles, the genuine opportunities alongside the genuine losses. Treat them as systems thinkers, not passengers.

I keep coming back to what the UCF graduate said. "It wasn't one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, 'This sucks.'"

What I find striking about that description is the "leaderlessness" of it. Nobody organized it. Nobody gave the signal. It emerged from a shared understanding.

We can dismiss that as Gen Z cynicism. Or we can take it seriously as the most direct signal we've gotten about what the next generation actually needs from the institutions and leaders claiming to prepare them. Our students really hate AI and refuse to engage. It's the refusal to engage that will increasingly become the problem, not just for them, but for all of us.

These students don't need another rocket ship metaphor.
They need to be empowered to design where it goes. They need to feel like they have an active role in it, or this will only get worse.

Make it Happen. Thanks for reading.

Nye Warburton is an artist and educator from Savannah, Georgia. These essays start as voice. First recorded in Otter.ai, shaped with Claude agents, and finally edited by hand in Obsidian. His collected essays are available as a printed book at nyewarburton.com/book.

• Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the "Next Industrial Revolution" — 404 Media

• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed during graduation speech about AI — NBC News

• AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers, Stanford study reveals — CNBC

• I Don't Know — A vision for education in an age of rapid acceleration.

• Tech's Perfect Storm of Layoffs — Covid's Whiplash, India & Billions of AI Cloud Infrastructure.

• Reframing Crisis as Opportunity — Even when all looks lost, life continues to find a way.