Jeremy Scott tears up AI speech at Kansas City Art Institute

When Jeremy Scott stood before the Kansas City Art Institute graduating class on May 16, he opened with the hollow, predictable platitudes of a machine-generated address. The room remained polite until the fashion designer stopped, dismissed the text as artificial, and physically tore his notes to pieces, drawing immediate, thunderous applause.

Scott’s performance offered a sharp rebuttal to the growing unease surrounding artificial intelligence in creative fields. He argued that while software can mimic tone, it lacks the capacity for the original, passionate thought that defines the human artist. To Scott, the artist’s role is not to record facts, but to bend reality and act as a mirror to society—tasks he insists remain beyond the reach of algorithms.

This visceral rejection of AI stands in stark contrast to recent commencement seasons, where speakers like Eric Schmidt and Scott Borchetta faced open hostility for their pro-automation rhetoric. Graduates entering a labor market currently being reshaped by efficiency-driven layoffs are understandably wary. By framing human intuition as a necessary defiance against "AI overlords," Scott aligned himself with a generation increasingly resistant to the encroachment of automated systems in their professional and private lives.