College students have been booing commencement speakers who dare to mention artificial intelligence. The boos were heard at the University of Central Florida, when Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, called AI “the next Industrial Revolution.” And at the University of Arizona, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned “the architects of artificial intelligence,” last year’s Time people of the year. And also at Middle Tennessee State University, when Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record executive, told graduates that AI is “rewriting the production process.” Boos, audible enough to be captured on video.Those videos spread quickly on social media. The posts first cited the fact of the booing, which is undeniable. As that fact spread, others drew conclusions. NBC News reported that the term artificial intelligence proved “wildly unpopular” because it was “striking a sore spot.” The Wall Street Journal cited the boos as evidence that “The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam.” Fox News said the boos against Schmidt represented grads letting Schmidt know “exactly what they thought of AI.”Watching the clips, and then the reactions, and then reading stories about the reactions, and then taking in blog-style, big-idea conclusions about what the reactions meant, I felt the internet drawing me toward an interpretation that was supposed to be obvious—that young people loathe AI, and that they hate AI because it and the power brokers who invented, wield, and praise it have stolen from them the last vestige of a future that those brokers had already stolen in large part before they did so by means of AI.[Read: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing?]But as a university professor and administrator, I also know that new graduates by and large love AI. The technology has already changed college students forever, I wrote at the start of this academic year. My colleague Lila Shroff and I discussed how AI had broken high school as well. Three years ago, the first year of AI college ended in ruin, as students raced to see what AI could do—and what they could get away with by using it—while professors and universities found themselves ignorant and unprepared. Even students at small, elite liberal-arts colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar, have found themselves wrestling with AI’s ability to help them cheat their way out of the bespoke, high-touch, and expensive education that made attending a small college appealing.The public seems to want these boos to mean something definitive and specific—the way an AI chatbot is supposed to provide a certain answer, right or wrong. To me, the booing sounds more like a cosmic howl.Artificial intelligence exposed the wicked problems in higher education that long predated AI: bureaucratic universities, transactional students, overburdened faculty, risk-averse administrators, and a culture obsessed with achievement. From up close, the crisis was never a single failure but an accumulation of compromises. Students gamed the rules. Professors cut corners. Administrators chased mandates and opportunities. All of them were responding rationally to institutions that rewarded ambition, efficiency, and advancement over learning itself.I thought of this knotty mess when I watched the clip of Borchetta, the record-label CEO, getting heckled at Middle Tennessee State University. “Deal with it,” Borchetta said after the boos began. “It’s a tool,” he said of AI. “Make it work for you.” Borchetta had given $15 million to name the university’s college of media and entertainment, making him one of the types of people whose wealth and influence now drives academic policy.Watched in isolation, the clip suggests a tidy story. A rich guy who got his sneers at students whose theirs he now threatens to automate away, while also lecturing those very same students that they better accept this future as both inevitable and desirable. Borchetta’s label, Big Machine Records, signed a young Taylor Swift in 2005, an accomplishment that later devolved into a spectacle of creative credit, ownership, and control after Big Machine sold her masters to Scooter Braun. How much more symbolism does one require to cast AI as bad news, and people such as Borchetta as evil overlords for wielding it with so little thought?But listening to Borchetta’s entire speech—which I had to scroll past a Google AI overview of the controversy it supposedly summarized to find—I felt as if I were visiting an alternate universe. Borchetta told, in brief, the story of Napster, whose 1999 appearance caused record executives to “lose their minds.” They saw only the threat, and for that reason, Borchetta said, they could not see the future—which was music streaming. And that future was not great for recording artists. Record executives like him, and the artists he distributed, went from wholesaling albums for $12 or so to “literally chasing fractions of pennies around the world,” he said. Borchetta presented streaming as a foreign invader that was unwelcome but too powerful to defeat.Whether Borchetta deserves praise for how he navigated this situation is debatable. In addition to signing Swift and growing acts such as Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts, Borchetta’s Big Machine also embraced digital marketing—including on Myspace—earlier than other labels, making him seem prescient. But the Swift dispute, which arose in 2019, during the $330 million sale of Big Machine, also made Borchetta seem like an executive who put his own interests ahead of the artists he also claimed to champion.A conflict between an artist and a record label is not a new story (Prince versus Warner, George Michael versus Sony, and the Beatles versus Capitol are but a few precedents). But the Swift-Borchetta dispute took place at a moment of ambiguous and massive cultural change, when “creators” began overtaking artists as the owners and operators of their own work and catalog. And part of the change was the emergence of artists who advertised themselves as executives, which is exactly how Swift came out of the fiasco—as a billionaire who found the balance between label power and individual power.“What will be the stories we tell from this turbulent moment in time?” Borchetta asked his audience. He leaned on commencement-safe aphorisms such as There is no limit to what you can do to encourage the graduates before him. He told them to “be fearless.” He urged them not to let the entertainment industry convince them that “there are no seats left at the table.”It is always easy for a wealthy and successful person to present their own success as deliberate and replicable rather than accidental, and Borchetta certainly delivered that message. But on the whole, over the 15 minutes he spoke, Borchetta did the job he was assigned. He encouraged graduates to believe in themselves, to chase their dreams. The line that “AI is rewriting production” came at the end of this message, as the latest in a line of changes that had included streaming and social media as prior examples. When the time for the boos came, Borchetta’s unrehearsed response, “Deal with it,” seemed like a concurrence with the student view rather than a rebuke of it.I wasn’t in the room, and I can’t speak to the intentions of the students who booed. But they may have been expressing dissatisfaction less against AI in particular than against the complex problem of how to be a creative person in the second quarter of the 21st century. “Then do something about it,” Borchetta finally said to the AI boos. In context, Borchetta was not a clueless AI booster hawking the tech to college graduates who can’t stand it. “Invest in the skill and the art of creation,” he said in conclusion. “AI is not going to change that.”After watching the actual speech, rather than the clip extracted from it and posted to TikTok or broadcast on cable news, I felt a tug of discomfort. This pang has become familiar as I’ve thought, written, and lived in this new era of AI: that the harm the technology is accused of bringing about—a slurry of automated thought and expression built of approximated, statistical sentiment rather than considered, individual judgment—motivates AI detractors as much as proponents. That “AI thinking” is now all thinking, and that it amounts to not thinking much at all.The whole notion of opposition to or support of AI has started to seem irrelevant. A host of conditions—among them handheld computers and social media, cable news and supermarket tabloids, technological opportunism and historical ignorance—produced a situation in which “The Class of 2026 Hates AI” emerged as a convenient headline, one compatible with the social-media music-discovery process that Borchetta accurately explained. [Read: The AI backlash could get very ugly]And, you know, maybe the class of 2026 does hate AI. Surveys suggest that it is widely unpopular in the United States, and for good reason. AI is not yet responsible for the wholesale collapse of the job market, but companies have certainly used AI as an excuse to cut jobs or not fill new ones. The entry-level-job market is worse than it’s been in almost four decades, and those are the opportunities that today’s graduates were promised when they were coaxed to strive toward the accomplishments that got them into college in the first place.Whatever pressure AI is exerting on opportunity seems doomed to make students even more focused on aspiration and success. That pressure will only worsen the state of affairs in colleges and universities, which are also beset by the financial chaos of the second Trump administration, a cascade that may threaten the very idea of American college life. The boos don’t mean nothing, but they probably don’t mean something easily summarized, either.So an easy answer is: Just blame AI anyway. If the same forces of power and control that turned Napster into Spotify, and Google into Gemini, would stop turning the screws yet again, and even more tightly, on the torture machine that has been constricting us for years and decades, then we would be free. I suppose that is true, but it is also a fantasy. And the future is built not from a fantasy but from the present, and the present is given to us in its current form.This is different from saying AI is here, so deal with it. In the ideal version of the college classrooms of 2026, a topic such as this would be given the time, space, and attention to unfold slowly, deliberately, and systematically. “It’s complicated!” the ideal version of a professor like me would say, and the student would want to learn more, and would exit the classroom and cross the quad talking about it, and would come to office hours and write a thoughtful paper and be inspired to pursue a calling or invent an idea or just reverberate inside the complexity of the question, and by extension the complexity of most questions, or most good ones, anyway. I wonder if such a future can still exist for college students (or professors, or writers), or if it has already been abandoned. I worry that this time, the answer is a simple one.