Tuesday, June 02, 2026

College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn’t stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams - Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune

On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates—the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/college-students-booing-commencement-speakers-ai-cheating-cognitive-dissonance/

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