What the Booing Was Saying

In the second week of May 2026, a new ritual quietly appeared at American college commencements. The boo. At the University of Central Florida on May 8, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told the graduating class of the College of Arts and Humanities that AI is "the next industrial revolution," and was met by thousands of booing students. Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI sucks!"¹ The next day at Middle Tennessee State, music executive Scott Borchetta told graduates "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," got the same response, and snapped back, "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool."² On May 16, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stood in front of roughly ten thousand graduates at the University of Arizona and tried, more gently, to read the room. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written," he said. "I can hear you." The boos kept coming.³

By the weekend, NPR, Axios, and Fortune were all writing variations of the same sentence. In the spring of 2026, booing AI has become the graduation ritual.²

None of the speakers, in their replies, named the thing the boos were pointing at.

The Contradiction Underneath

A Harvard Youth Poll released in November found that roughly 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, while 77% of the Class of 2025 say they expect to use AI tools at work after graduation.⁴ A Higher Education Policy Institute survey published this spring found that 94% of UK undergraduates now use generative AI for their assessed work, up from just over half two years ago.⁵ The students booing on stage are also the students writing with the tool every night in their dorm rooms.

Read flatly, this looks like hypocrisy. Read carefully, it is something else. The students are not booing the existence of the tool. They are booing the story being told about it from a stage that has stopped paying attention to their work.

What the Boo Is Pointing At

The morning after the UCF ceremony, a graduate named Gill told a local reporter, "We don't want it messing with our job prospects and messing with the jobs that we've worked for years, so hard for four years, to kind of be eligible for."¹ Listen to that sentence. The grievance is not the technology. It is that four years of late nights, drafts, half-thought-through arguments, problem sets that finally clicked at 1 a.m., are about to be flattened by a machine that can produce a final artifact in nine seconds, and by a culture that increasingly treats only the artifact as real.

The boo is pointing at a chasm between effort and outcome. The student spent four years becoming someone. The stage is telling them the someone is interchangeable.

What the Stage Could Have Said

The speakers were not wrong to want to comfort the graduates. The trouble is the script. The story they all carried up to the lectern was the same one corporate America has been telling itself for three years. AI is a revolution. Embrace it. Get on the rocketship without asking which seat.³ That story might still be true. It is just no longer new. The graduates have lived inside it for the last quarter of their lives. They have seen friends submit AI-written work and never get caught. They have seen good students get falsely accused. They have done honest revisions in the dark and watched professors treat the final draft as if it had appeared whole. The boo is not anti-AI. It is anti-amnesia. It is the sound of a generation wanting the work they did to mean something in a world that has stopped looking at it.

The Quiet Direction the Future Could Take

A coherent future for education, one the Class of 2030 might not boo, is not really about more AI or less AI. It is about making student work visible again. Not visible in the surveillance sense. Visible in the human sense. The drafts in the order they were written. The question a student asked the tutor at 11 p.m. and what they did with the answer. The pause where someone reread their own paragraph and rewrote it because they finally saw what was wrong with it. The breakthrough that came twenty minutes after a piece of feedback.

A classroom that captures that record gives a teacher something to honor. It gives an employer something to read. It gives a student something to point to and say, this part is mine, and the machine did not do it for me. None of that requires opting out of AI. It requires opting back into the work.

This is the bet we are making at Koan. The workspace records the path, not just the product. Aidan, the tutor, sits inside the path rather than on top of it. When a student finishes a piece of writing, the artifact is one page of a much longer record of how the thinking moved.

The Sentence They Are Waiting to Hear

Somewhere next May, a commencement speaker is going to walk onto a stage in front of eight thousand graduates and say something close to this. Your work is not the thing you submitted. Your work is everything you did to get there, and the machines did not do that part for you. That speech, if anyone gives it, will not be booed.

If the boos in May 2026 were a generation telling the stage that their effort has gone unseen, what is the classroom going to do, in September, to start seeing it again?