The class of 2026 has heard enough about AI, thanks

AI + ML

From campus ceremonies to Linux communities and academic journals, resistance to LLM evangelism is getting louder

It’s exam and graduation time in the academic year, and some
students are making their anti-AI feelings heard. It’s not the only place.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the commencement speech to the
graduating class at the University of Arizona on Sunday, and his line “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence” was met with a loud chorus of boos and jeering, as The
Guardian reports. Not for the first time: last week, students
at the University of Central Florida also booed
real estate executive Gloria Caulfield for calling AI “the next
industrial revolution.”

NBC’s report
on Schmidt’s speech has a video clip that includes both reactions, as well as a similarly negative reception to pro-AI remarks
by record producer Scott Borchetta, giving another commencement
speech at Middle Tennessee State University.
Borchetta is the boss of Big Machine, the former label of Taylor Swift, whose six-year
battle with the company has its own
compendious Wikipedia article.

As no stranger to controversy, Schmidt is probably not too worried. The Register reported on him blaming working from
home for Google’s stumbles
in the AI race in 2024. However, it’s notable that these
captains of industry appear surprised by anti-AI sentiment.

Granted, this vulture is an arch-skeptic in this matter, but we are
noticing increasing levels of resistance and pushback against the rise
of LLM bots.

Earlier this month, we reported that both
Fedora and Ubuntu were planning to include more AI. Since then,
there has been sufficient negative sentiment from the Fedora community
that the Fedora
AI Developer Desktop Initiative community initiative proposal,
approved at the start of May, is now blocked by two “-1” votes. One of
these is from Justin Wheeler, who, as we noted, wrote a blog
post about Fedora’s
AI-Assisted Contributions Policy. He and Red Hatter Miro Hrončok
both changed their votes.

Other examples of recent writing about the changing positions on AI
that we’ve seen in the software development world include “I
don’t think AI will make your processes go faster,” and a long and
thoughtful piece from Baldur Bjarnason called “The
old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born.”

Related news comes from the scientific preprint site arXiv.
The chair of its Computer Science section, Professor Thomas
Dietterich, announced both on X and
on
Bluesky that arXiv will ban authors who include LLM hallucinations
for a full year. Springer journal Social Indicators
Research is going further, with a lifetime
ban for LLM-generated submissions. ®