- Hamlet
Ian Bogost has some good thoughts it in Why College Students Are Booing AI:
[T]he 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.
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.
This is an age wherein we all inhabit contradictions (perhaps it has ever been thus). We can be prisoners in Denmark, or kings of infinite space bounded in a nutshell, often simultaneously.
Introducing a baseline activity on Friday, I told my new cohort that the curriculum is as much about their thinking about their thinking as it is about building, and building with, AI tools. My theme throughout everything I do has been simply to ask that we all show up as our authentic selves, and refuse to cede our cognition and humanity to computed probabilities.
In conclusion: This above all – to thine own self be true.
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