AI Wasn’t a Visitor. It Was a Roommate.
They’ve lived with AI since freshman year — so why are we still talking to them like it just showed up?
Beyond the Degree
AI Wasn’t a Visitor. It Was a Roommate.
They’ve lived with AI since freshman year — so why are we still talking to them like it just showed up?
Photo by Emmanuel Offei on Unsplash
Our graduates are not clapping when hearing about “AI” in their caps and gowns. They jeer. Not because they’ve never used the tools. Many of them have been living with them since freshman year.
The boos started as a headline. Or perhaps the mood for a while now?
But the room isn’t reacting to a technology. It’s reacting to a tone.
“Just Deal with It”
This spring, the boos showed up wherever a commencement speaker reached for AI, and each time the message sounded like inevitability handed down as advice. ***Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the University of Arizona***, telling graduates the technology would touch every profession, classroom, and relationship they had.
***At the University of Central Florida, a speaker got drowned out almost the moment she called AI “the next industrial revolution.” And at Middle Tennessee State, when graduates heckled [music executive Scott Borchetta](https://www.npr.org/2026/05/20/nx-s1-5822419/ai-colleges-commencement-booing) ***for saying “AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” he didn’t soften. He sharpened: “Deal with it.”
Although when ***Steve Wozniak addressed the students of Grand Valley State University***, he didn’t get booed. Why?
He didn’t dodge the premise. He leaned into it.
And then he said the line that changed the temperature in the room.
Addressing the anxiety of the graduating class, “You all have AI.” As the crowd shifted uncomfortably, expecting a pro-tech lecture, he emphatically clarified, “Actual Intelligence,” triggering massive cheers.
The bait-and-switch punchline celebrated the human over artificial intelligence.
By validating the students’ human worth rather than playing to tech shareholders.
“You all have AI — actual intelligence.”
Same topic. Different outcome.
But what’s going on?
Coverage last week identifies that the boos prove Gen Z is anti-AI. They say young people don’t want to work. They say they’re scared of the future and lashing out at the messenger.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years at the front of a classroom. I don’t buy any of it.
Wozniak didn’t get booed because his advice actually resonated with the students. They knew “The Woz” had lived it.
“You should always try to think different. Don’t follow the same steps as a million other people.”
In the mid-1970s, computers were massive, expensive machines locked away in corporate offices. Wozniak dreamed of something different: a personal computer he and his friends at the ***Homebrew Computer Club*** could actually use.
Before Apple grew into the giant it is today, Wozniak tried to give his designs away for free. He offered the schematics for the Apple I to his employer, Hewlett-Packard, ***five distinct times.*** Each time, HP passed — executives simply didn’t see a market for a home computer. AppleInsider, 2010.
His willingness to step outside established corporate channels let the technology reach everyday people.
Their College Roommate
What I hear in the boos is something more specific. A protest against being spoken to like a passenger on a bus that’s already left the station.
Because “AI will shape the world” isn’t new information to a graduate. And “deal with it”? That’s not leadership. It’s abandonment with confidence.
Wozniak didn’t offer a policy memo. He offered dignity.
He reminded graduates that even if the tools are advancing fast, the human mind in the seat still matters.
That’s why the line earned applause — not because it was cute, but because it landed like a hand on the shoulder.
The quieter truth adults keep skipping: this graduating class has been in the lab for four years.
ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. ***For this class, that was freshman year***— the first cohort to have nearly its entire undergraduate education shaped by AI. Then why talk about it like it’s a surprise?
AI wasn’t a visitor. It was a roommate. Sometimes helpful. Sometimes disruptive. Always there.
Mixed Messaging
Now they’re walking into a job market where AI isn’t just a tool they can choose. In some places, it’s the expectation they’ll be measured against.
Meta recently reported it will start grading employees on their “AI-driven impact” in 2026. That’s a big shift in a short time. It’s also the kind of shift that makes a new graduate feel like they’re being graded on a foreign language, missing from their degree plan.
And then there’s the noise about layoffs.
***AI efficiencies are among the reasons for the 2026 tech cuts, ***even when it’s a convenient label for being driven by other pressures. But it sticks.
The graduate hears “We want you to be AI-fluent” and “AI is why jobs are disappearing” at the same time.
That’s not paranoia. That’s mixed messaging.
Responsible Use
And the competition is real. ***ZipRecruiter’s 2026 grad report found clicks per entry-level job posting up nearly 22% year over year***— more graduates fighting for the same openings, many of them convinced AI is part of why those openings feel scarce.
On the education side, the picture isn’t any cleaner. Plenty of programs are still arguing about what AI fluency even means, let alone how to teach it.
Students are standing on a stage, listening to speeches about the future, quietly noticing the gap.
Employers are signaling: bring AI.
Headlines are signaling: AI is restructuring work.
Schools are signaling: we’re still figuring it out.
That’s not a character flaw in students. That’s a design problem in the educational system.
I’ve watched that design problem show up in my own teaching. Not in the abstract. Not in a policy debate.
I’ve seen and discussed with students how to decide whether they’re thinking or borrowing.
Last term, a student turned in a research review paper that was clean in the way hotel lobbies are clean. Smooth surfaces. No fingerprints. Not a mistake in sight.
It was “good.” It was also strangely weightless.
I asked them for one extra page. Not a confession. Not a moral essay. Just a process note.
What did you ask the model? What did you keep? What did you reject? What did you verify? What did you change, and why?
The next draft was less perfect.
But it also had a pulse.
The student didn’t stop using AI. They stopped hiding behind it. They re-entered the work. They made choices on the page and owned them.
That’s what Wozniak’s line protects. Not the romance of intelligence. The responsibility of it.
Pointing Fingers
Now, to be fair, institutions aren’t villains in this story.
If you teach, you’ve seen the worst versions of AI use. Essays that read like a fog machine. Citations that don’t exist. Arguments that sound confident and say nothing.
If you’re an administrator, you’re fielding real questions about privacy, liability, and what a credential is supposed to certify.
If you hire, you’re dealing with a flood of résumés and cover letters that look custom-made and may have been generated in minutes. That makes it harder to detect real skill and harder to be fair.
Some people reach for bans. Some reach for hard lines. Not because they hate students, but because they’re trying to protect something: trust.
I’m not dismissing that. I’m saying it’s incomplete.
Bans don’t teach judgment. They teach secrecy — they create underground workflows where the careful students ask permission and the careless ones don’t.
And when AI use goes underground, we lose sight of the one thing we claim to value: learning.
***Gallup’s research on Gen Z and AI helps explain*** the emotional texture beneath all this. Even as these students keep using the tools, their excitement has fallen and their wariness — even anger — has climbed. More contact doesn’t produce more comfort.
Adults read that as ignorance. Often it’s the opposite — discernment, or just fatigue. Sometimes it’s a question students don’t know how to ask out loud: if my robot can do the easy parts, what part of me still matters?
Wozniak answered that question in one sentence.
The New Literacy
Encouraging — until you try to translate it into a Tuesday. Because “you have actual intelligence” isn’t a slogan. It’s a practice.
It’s framing a problem before you outsource it. It’s noticing when a draft sounds polished but empty. It’s checking a claim instead of trusting a confident paragraph, and deciding what should stay human even when the human part is slower.
That’s the new literacy. Not prompting — responsible leverage.
Some employers are inching toward a better question. Not whether you can code, but what you’ve actually built with AI — and what you do when it hands you something wrong.
Not “Do you use AI?”
But “How do you use it, and what do you do when it’s wrong?”
That’s the bridge we owe students and early-career workers: environments where they can practice that judgment with feedback, not just prove it under pressure.
What does that look like in practice?
For starters, redesign our evaluations so polish isn’t the whole grade. Make thinking visible again.
In a classroom, that can be as simple as a short process note attached to a draft. Not a diary. A receipt.
In a workplace, it can be a norm that AI-assisted work still has an owner. Staff should be treated as owners, expected to explain what the model did, what was checked, and what was changed.
The point is not to punish AI use. The point is to keep a human inside the loop who can say, “This is true,” and mean it.
There are tradeoffs here, and we should name them.
Asking for a process adds workload. It can disadvantage students with less time, less confidence, or less fluency. It can be misused as surveillance if leaders get lazy.
The standard, then, has to be simple and humane. Short notes. Clear expectations. Graded for clarity, not length. Boundaries that protect privacy and focus on learning.
The New Standard
We don’t need perfect enforcement. We need a better design.
Because what graduates are reacting to at commencements isn’t just AI. It’s the feeling of being handed a shifting world with no map and then being told to smile about it.
That’s what “deal with it” communicates, even if the speaker didn’t mean it that way.
Wozniak’s line communicates something else.
Yes, the tools are advancing.
Yes, the market is changing.
And still, you are not a bystander.
You have actual intelligence.
That isn’t sentiment. It’s a standard — and standards can be taught.
The boos, messy as they are, read like a request. Stop narrating inevitability; start building on-ramps. Stop speaking in destiny; start speaking in practice. Stop grading performance; start grading judgment — and teach people how to stay honest while using the tools, instead of pretending they aren’t here.
If AI is going to become cognitive infrastructure, then “show your thinking” can’t be a childhood habit we grow out of.
It has to become the main deliverable again.
Not out of fear of the machine — out of respect for the human in the loop.
What would change in your course, your team, your hiring loop, or your own workflow if the clearest signal of competence wasn’t the output, but the ownership behind it?
Join the Conversation
When you’ve read something “clean in the way hotel lobbies are clean,” what tipped you off? What line, what absence, what feeling in your gut told you the draft was polished but hollow?
And if you’ve ever heard a speaker promise that “AI will shape everything” in a room full of graduates, students, or colleagues, what did you feel in that moment — pressure, relief, resentment, curiosity?
Where did your mind go first?
After Commencement, Stop By TheNextClassroom_
If you’re living in the tension between AI-as-expectation and human judgment as the real work, come hang out in TheNextClassroom_ — where we trade classroom stories, practical pedagogy, and tech-enabled workflows that keep students (and faculty) inside the thinking.
References
Here is the chronological References list formatted according to APA 7th edition guidelines.
Jackson, S.(2026, May 21). ***New graduates booing commencement speakers AI*. **CNBC.
Hllingsworth, H., Gecker, J. (2026, May 20). ***The sound of graduating from college in the AI summer of 2026: Boo***. Fortune.
Aslam, M., Joffe-Block, J.(226, May 20). ***AI colleges commencement booing*.** (2026, May 20). NPR.
Chakarian, Ella. (2026, May 20). ***This sentence about AI got Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak applause, not boos, for his commencement speech***. (2026, May 20). Fast Company.
Walker, Josephine. (2026, May 19). ***College graduates’ AI commencement speech*. **Axios.
Schulam, D. (2026, April 14). ***Gen Z’s AI use remains stable as skepticism grows, Gallup finds*. **(2026, April 9). U.S. News & World Report.
GriffithGriffiths, B). (2026, April 2). ***Tech layoffs Q1 March data AI impact*.** Business Insider.
Mann, Jyoti. (2025, November 14). ***Meta AI employee performance review overhaul*. **Business Insider.
Ong, J. (2010, December 6). ***Apple co-founder offered first computer design to HP 5 times***. AppleInsider.
CHM. (n.d.). ***The Homebrew Computer Club*. **Computer History Museum.
The opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views or positions of my employer.
I’m just a dad who blogs about the intersections of life, faith, family, and technology. These are the threads that weave through my personal and spiritual walk.
© Dave Hallmon, May 25, 2026.
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