At the University of Central Florida last week, a commencement speaker told the graduating class that the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. The class booed her. Someone shouted “AI SUCKS.” A few days later at Carnegie Mellon, Jensen Huang said something almost identical to a hall of new engineers, and they gave him a standing ovation.
Two stages, two crowds, more or less the same message — and reactions about as far apart as a graduation can produce. That gap is the story.
The speaker at UCF was Gloria Caulfield, a VP at a real-estate development company. The audience was the College of Arts and Humanities and the communications school — writers, journalists, designers, people who chose those degrees and want to do those jobs. Madison Fuentes, an English creative writing graduate, said afterward: “I don’t think that kids are having a hard time accepting it because we know that AI exists. I think we’re just having a hard time acknowledging that it’s taking away job opportunities from us.” That isn’t a tantrum. It’s a clear-eyed summary of the labour market.
The numbers don’t make this a vibes story
Handshake polled 2,440 graduating seniors this year: 60{b429a798230856d49161ae42df084d7ca4a19b74753c3a4d4b576ab430076c41} are pessimistic about their careers, up from 50{b429a798230856d49161ae42df084d7ca4a19b74753c3a4d4b576ab430076c41} the year before. Job postings are down 16{b429a798230856d49161ae42df084d7ca4a19b74753c3a4d4b576ab430076c41} year over year, applications per posting up 26{b429a798230856d49161ae42df084d7ca4a19b74753c3a4d4b576ab430076c41}. The New York Fed has young bachelor’s-degree holders at a 5.6{b429a798230856d49161ae42df084d7ca4a19b74753c3a4d4b576ab430076c41} unemployment rate, the highest in four years. Stanford pegged Q4 2025 at 5.7{b429a798230856d49161ae42df084d7ca4a19b74753c3a4d4b576ab430076c41}, which is worse than during the 2008 financial crisis. Nearly half of the pessimistic students named generative AI as a contributing factor. Most hiring managers rated the entry-level market as poor or fair.
The first rung of the ladder is where AI hits hardest. Drafting copy, doing background research, producing first-pass designs, summarising long documents — those used to be the assignments a 22-year-old got handed to prove they could do the work. They are also the assignments most cheaply done by a model. The graduates booing weren’t booing the technology. They were booing the framing that called this an “industrial revolution” and stopped there, as if industrial revolutions don’t have a column for the people they displace.
Why Huang got applauded and Caulfield got booed
Huang said, “AI will not replace you, but someone who uses AI better might.” It’s a great line for engineers. They are going to learn the tools because the tools are part of the degree. Of course the framing where mastery beats mastery plays well in that room. But the same sentence, said to an English major who spent four years learning to write, is a demand to retool against your own training. It is not the same offer.
The CMU crowd wasn’t wrong to applaud. They heard a message tailored to them and reacted to it. The UCF crowd was given a Jeff Bezos quote and told that the future is exciting. They are also the future, and the speech treated them like the audience, not the subject.
The second part of Fuentes’s sentence is the part worth sitting with: we know that AI exists. The graduates do. Students in English and design and comms aren’t naive about it — many are using it, sometimes more creatively than the CS students in the next building. The complaint isn’t that AI is here. The complaint is being told, at the end of four years of work, that the thing eating your industry is “the next industrial revolution” — and being expected to clap.
The honest version of that speech would have said something harder. Something about which jobs are going first, what schools should have been teaching, what employers should be doing. Not Jeff Bezos. Not Howard Schultz. Not “the next industrial revolution.” A real read of the room.