Label Dork Scott Borchetta Gets Booed For Extolling AI At College Graduation

It's graduation season! All over these United States, fresh-faced college seniors are throwing their mortarboards up into the air and heading out into the real world! That real world is now a very uncertain place, thanks in large part to the vampiric billionaire class that's determined to replace workers with malfunctioning bots and to make sure that nothing will ever do the thing it's supposed to do again, so that casts a bit of a shadow over the big day. But in an encouraging sign, these graduating seniors are now booing the fuck out of all the clueless graduation speakers who insist on talking about AI like it's a good thing. Perhaps not surprisingly, the snippiest one of of those speakers is a record-label guy.

Scott Borchetta. You know this guy? You heard about this guy? He's the founder of Big Machine Label Group, and yes, that name predates the current Epstein-class craze for generative artificial intelligence. Borchetta, a veteran country-industry A&R guy, launched Big Machine in 2005, and his greatest achievement was signing the 14-year-old Taylor Swift, who singlehandedly turned the label into a powerhouse. Fifteen years later, Borchetta incurred Swift's wrath by selling the label to Scooter Braun, this kicking off the long saga that finally ended with Swift bought back her master recordings last year. Those two things — signing Taylor Swift and selling Taylor Swift's masters — are really the only reasons you might know Borchetta's name. But those activities made him a lot of money, and presumably that's why he was invited to speak at Middle Tennessee State University's graduation last week.

As the New York Post points out, MTSU has an entire college, Scott Borchetta College Of Media And Entertainment, named after this man. That did not save him from the loud disgust of its graduating class. At the May 10 graduation ceremony, Borchetta told the crowd, "Streaming rewrote the economics. Social media rewrote the discovery model. AI is rewriting production as we sit here." He got some scattered boos for that last bit, and his eyebrows went up. He bitchily shot back, "I know it. Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool." The boos got louder. Borchetta smiled, but his eyes looked cold and dead.

He kept going. "Hey, like I said, you can hear me now, or you can pay me later." He really thought he got a bar off there. A few sycophants laughed. Borchetta smiled huge, as if he'd just accomplished something. But when nobody applauded, his eyes registered a combination of anger and panic, and he said, "Hey, then do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Hmm. A tool. An interesting word choice.

Look, this is my human interpretation of the video. Watch it for yourself, and see if you feel any different.

Borchetta's oops moment is part of a larger trend of graduating speakers mentioning AI and getting booed. The graduating class of 2026 hates that shit! Stop talking about this cursed environment like it's a great thing!

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, formerly known as DJ D-Sol, had better luck when speaking at Wharton. After talking about knowing the Chainsmokers and Kygo, he then told the crowd that he'd used Suno to make an AI-generated house track, just for them! He then played the song. It fucking sucked. After cutting it off, he said, "That took 10 seconds to create." This graduating class was nice enough not to boo him for that, but they would've been ethically justified if they stormed the stage and tore him limb from limb like it was the end of Dawn Of The Dead. (It happens around the 49-minute mark of the video below.)

That was so upsetting. To wash away that terrible memory, here's a parade of rich fuckheads mentioning AI and getting booed. Google CEO Eric Schmidt!

Real estate exec Gloria Caulfield!

CalArts president Ravi Ranjan, and also his secretary!

Also, this happened!

In related garbage bullshit news, just from the past week, Steven Rosenbaum's book The Future Of Truth, about AI's effect on consensus reality, has made-up AI quotes that nobody actually said. The Commonwealth Foundation gave a short story award to a story, which ran in the literary magazine Granta, that seems to be AI-generated. Cantankerous film great Paul Schrader says that he "procured an online AI girlfriend," which dumped him. Google search reportedly plans to replace its search-result links with an AI-powered Q&A situation, effectively rendering its own search function useless. Congratulations, class of 2026! What a time to be alive!