When Ronny Chieng took the stage as a commencement speaker this year for Harvard Class Day 2026, he did not offer inspiration or career guidance. Standing in front of graduating students at a moment when universities and corporations alike have been aggressively promoting artificial intelligence as the future, Chieng opened by talking against the use of AI.
“F**k AI,” he said. “F**k AI. F**k AI.”
Then he got into it.
Chieng’s speech arrived at a particular moment in commencement season, as a pattern was becoming difficult to ignore. Tech executives and corporate boosters had been traveling from campus to campus to tell graduating classes that artificial intelligence represented an essential opportunity they needed to understand and embrace.
Students, in growing numbers, were responding with open displeasure. Graduates at the University of Central Florida, Arizona State University, and Middle Tennessee State University each pushed back with audible frustration when speakers promoted AI.
Chieng, the comedian and correspondent known for his precise, unsparing observations, was not interested in selling the same vision.
“A lot of other respected graduation speakers and colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future,” he told the audience. “I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI. K*ll it.”
Where executives have pitched AI as a sweeping wave of progress that this generation must learn to ride, Chieng offered a simpler and more personal diagnosis. The technology is not leveling the playing field or empowering new talent. It is, in his view, doing something more damaging to the people who lean on it most.
“AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber,” he said.
To make the point vivid, Chieng turned to a type of AI boosterism he finds particularly telling: the person who brags about using technology to accomplish things ordinary competence should already cover.
The scenario he described was familiar to anyone who has spent time around enthusiastic AI adopters. Someone discovers that a program can read their email, summarize it, and generate a response, and they treat this as something worth announcing.
“Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me,” Chieng said. “I can do that. You can’t do that? How useless are you? You need artificial intelligence just to match me? I’m a dumbass who couldn’t get into Harvard.”
The bit was characteristically self-deprecating, but the argument underneath it was serious. If someone needs an external tool to perform functions that any reasonably capable person manages without assistance, the tool is not extending that person’s abilities. It is compensating for their absence.
Chieng applied the same logic to creative work. He took aim at the growing tendency among public figures to rely openly on AI for producing speeches, scripts, podcasts, and promotional content, including what he described as “promo videos for UFC fig hts at the White House, which, to be fair, even if they had filmed that for real, it would still have looked like AI.”
The reference was deliberately comic, but it pointed toward something being discussed seriously in fields like journalism, archiving, and the humanities, where AI tools are not expanding career possibilities for early-career workers so much as narrowing them. Positions that once served as natural entry points into research, communications, and writing are closing without replacement.
Companies have cited AI when explaining significant rounds of layoffs. The graduates being asked to celebrate this technology are the same people inheriting a professional landscape being reorganized around it.
Chieng did not suggest the answer was to ignore these shifts or wait for conditions to improve. His argument was about what gets lost when the shortcut becomes the point.
“The creating is the fun part,” he said. “The journey isn’t just how we acquire skills. The journey is the point of all this. It is.”
That final thought was not unlike sentiments expressed by other speakers this commencement season. Chieng framed it through the growing divide between those who see AI as the future and those being asked to live with its consequences before it has delivered anything meaningful for them.
The graduates who booed those other speakers already understood this. They were not rejecting progress. They were rejecting the version of the future being handed to them by people with no real stake in whether it worked out.
Chieng was simply the one with a microphone who agreed.
