As if it wasn't already obvious, Gen Z really hates AI — Wall Street should take note

As universities kick off commencement season, some sage advice or wise words are would usually be in order for thousands of college graduates entering the workforce.

However, amid one of the worst job markets for fresh grads in recent history, Gen Z is providing their own commentary as they collect their degree: boos for artificial intelligence, or AI.

To anybody who has been paying attention, it’s no surprise. AI has a clear and obvious messaging problem, whether it’s headlines about layoffs or data centers spiking power bills and ruining local communities.

However, for many Gen Z, the rise of AI is more personal. It’s arguably affecting their job prospects.

Gen Z tangles with the AI problem

While AI drove a short-lived structural boom in some parts of the U.S. economy, young graduates are facing the highest unemployment rates since the pandemic, and going back further, the aftermath of the Great Recession. Worse, one study purports that 42% of college grads are “underemployed.”

Many have attributed this uptick in unemployment and underemployment to companies choosing not to hire new grads because of AI, rather than other difficult economic conditions. Many companies purport that they can do ‘less with more’ by using AI in the enterprise. Some companies like Meta are even training AI by making it watch what its employees are doing, likely with the long-term hope of replacing them.

Either way, less companies are hiring, more are spending more on AI credits, and the product is a generation scorned and angry.

Young people aren’t in the driver’s seat

While AI leaders like Jensen Huang swear by AI as a skill that will make young people more competitive in the job market, an April Gallup study shows that many Gen Z Americans are growing weary of the technology.

Over half of Gen Z report having used it, but adoption is flatlining. And worse, the sentiment towards AI has soured. Anxiety around the technology remains high, but excitement and hopefulness around it has declined considerably year-over-year.

Those feelings also boil down to how they feel about its impacts in the enterprise: nearly a majority say that the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the benefits.

This skepticism around AI runs counter to, at least historically speaking, the kind of adoption that technology has seen. It has traditionally been young people who have driven the momentum.

This time, it feels more like a bunch of ‘olds’ telling young people something. To very loosely paraphrase one speaker at a commencement: ‘This is inevitable, and you’re going to deal with it.’

AI has a messaging problem

That messaging is not just failing to land with young people; it’s failing to land with the whole country.

A Pew Research study says just 17% of Americans said they expect AI will have a positive effect on the U.S. over the next two decades, Businesses also appear to be nervy about adopting it because of costs and uncertainty around the technology.

Perceptions around the technology are certainly not helped by its forefigures. The association of many of the world’s wealthiest people, many of which have blessed the current U.S. administration, is surely not helping matters.

Worse, many wealthy tech elites put millions forward pro-AI candidates and lobby existing politicians, hoping to counter the growing unpopularity of the technology in the American public.

Who is the message for?

We now have enough of these videos where business leaders, mostly wealthy folks, are getting booed at college commencements to ask: If you know something isn’t popular and won’t be well received, why say it at all?

Maybe it’s self-serving. Perhaps the most fruitful evidence of that is the way that the messaging itself isn’t so much about the students; it’s not about their future, it’s about this other future that looks contrarian.

“A.I. is rewriting production as we sit here… deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool… hear me now or pay me later.”

Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record label executive, gets booed by MTSU grads when he brings up A.I. pic.twitter.com/wP9LLhU0Yw

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) May 22, 2026

But really, it feels all the opposite. It makes obvious that they are not contrarian; they are pedaling the same views that many of the wealthy elite, who’s investment portfolios are increasingly attached to the staying power of the boom, are pushing. They might genuinely believe that AI is an unstoppable force that you either embrace or get left behind.

Or, maybe more insidiously, they know it’s far from an inevitability.

This year’s self-important commencement speeches about a future that an increasing number of young people evidently do not want might act as a sort of highlight reel of wealthy people attempting to engineer consent for a technology which is still largely unproven and unprofitable. Therein, the reactions are free advertising for employers, as if they’re saying, “Look at these young people and their outrage. That is the power of what we are building.”

I think skeptics might be right to point out that many people who purport to hate AI don’t understand it, or worse, are hypocrites and use it in spite of their disgust for large language models (LLMs). There are likely large swaths of young people saying that they hate AI, while openly using it to cheat on their assignments or generate the slop they begrudge.

But there is the foreboding that AI itself is turning into a dicey political issue. And while the industry is convinced it can dig itself out of the situation by funneling money into local, state, and federal elections, there is a possibility that the industry not choosing to tackle the issue head on could turn it into an easy issue for a particularly enterprising politician to campaign and capitalize on.

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