I hope this covers everything the 2026 commencement speaker was tempted to say about AI. If you’re honored with the opportunity to address a graduating class on their big day, you’re welcome to link them to that section of the text I wrote instead of actually saying it, because the thing is, if you say it, you’ll get booed.
It happened to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield when she spoke to graduates of the University of Central Florida, and then it happened to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt when he spoke to graduates of the University of Arizona.
But like contact tracers working backwards to trace the source of a contagion, an early example of an AI-booing incident emerged on the Internet, given a day after Caulfield’s speech, before it went viral.
This speech came from a man with a net worth of $450 million Scott Borchetta, a record executive who founded Big Machine Label Group, and was one of Taylor Swift’s opponents in her Masters dispute a few years ago. Middle Tennessee State University named its media college after Borchetta after a $15 million donation. He also gave this year’s commencement speech:
It’s impossible to hate the whole speech. Borchetta says now is “arguably the most exciting and challenging time ever” for media, which, by the way, is kind of exciting. At one point he says, “There’s more to this world than just immense wealth and political power,” and how can one help but nod in agreement?
Also, to be clear, he is not portraying AI as a net benefit to the world. He said this at the beginning of the speech. “Our biggest challenge today? Pretty easy guess: AI,” Borchetta says, and for now, the crowd is with him.
The problem is that Borchetta has conflated AI with the big challenge he and Big Machine faced when it first took over the music business: how to make a profit from streaming. In his statement, he made it his job to “sound the alarm” to the record industry when Spotify was about to put the final nail in the coffin of the CD, and turned the “tools” of streaming to his advantage. He seems to have found a way to secure some kind of profitable balance for himself and his artists under the new system.
And good for him. But as long as the story goes that Spotify Did Pull record labels out of their piracy-induced situation and return them to profitability, even though they are believed to have done so at the expense of the financial stability of the artists themselves. The New York Times wrote in 2021 that while Spotify’s stated goal was to help one million artists earn a living, the reality is that the streaming model mostly funnels money to labels and already rich artists, and at the time, only 13,000 total artists worldwide out of seven million total artists on Spotify – about one-tenth of two percent – were receiving $50,000 or more in royalties.
But Borchetta is the hero of his own story, and that’s the version he’s telling the graduates. When the room realizes he’s rhyming that story with AI — essentially telling them to arm themselves with AI the way he did streaming, and to use their weapons to slit someone’s throat before they cut their throats — you can clearly hear some of them revolting. The hooting and hollering is barely audible in the video, but Borchetta reacts like the world’s most daring, surfer-accented sea captain, concerned that he might have to carry out a very quiet mutiny:
“The AI is rewriting production as we’re sitting here (boo). I know it. Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool. (scoffs angrily) Hey, like I said, you can, you can listen to me now, or you can pay me later. Hey, then do something about it, ‘kay? It’s a tool. Make it work for you.'”
Naturally, he also compares AI to a genie and insists, “It will not go back into the bottle.”
The line, “You can listen to me now, or you can pay me later,” is accompanied by a teeth-clenched smile, and Borchetta comes across like someone sitting on a throne above a mountain of corpses, teasing the audience. His “do something about it” sounds like a real challenge.
On its own terms, Borchetta isn’t wrong. There is no doubt that our economic system disproportionately benefits the unlucky, and it certainly does not lend itself to complaints that it is unjust. The winner takes the spoils, and who can dispute that Borchetta is the winner?
A recent report from the New York Fed exposes the logic underlying all the cruelty of Borchetta’s speech. Borchetta is a CEO, and many CEOs self-report that they are refusing to hire younger people in favor of older workers. The survey data also shows that with the future in mind, CEOs are envisioning smaller employees. Meanwhile, 90% say they are deploying AI in their companies in some way.
So, again, you can’t fault Borchetta’s honesty. But when did it become good practice among early speakers to tell new workers entering the economy that they partly, essentially, control, Your piece of the pie is getting smaller; I have this; So you better come and take it from me? Who wants to throw their hat in the air after hearing this?
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