AI + ML
The class of 2026 has heard enough about AI, thanks
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. ®
