The Daily Show's Ronny Chieng finally finds AI commencement speech grads won't boo

Chieng didn't pull punches with his Harvard audience: "I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI."

By William Hughes  |  May 28, 2026 | 9:17pm
Ronny Chieng, Screenshot: YouTube
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The Daily Show's Ronny Chieng finally finds AI commencement speech grads won't boo

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been treated to some pretty spectacular examples of very rich and ostensibly powerful people completely failing to read the room, when said room is “wherever a bunch of matriculating college students are being forced to sit through a tone-deaf pro-AI speech from some bloodless business guy before getting their diplomas.” Guys like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt got up in front of graduating classes and were apparently shocked to then get booed when they attempted to evangelize artificial intelligence to young people who have watched the technology mutate and wither their social lives, educations, and career prospects rapidly over the last five years. Finally, though, one man appears to have cracked the question of how to talk about AI at a graduation event without getting tomatoes chucked at your head: The Daily Show‘s Ronny Chieng, who declared at a Harvard Class Day event this week that “I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI.”

Only half-joking, Chieng noted that he wasn’t speaking specifically about those using AI in technical fields, where there might by hypothetical use cases that do not render the technology’s users so attention-starved they can barely get through an entire YouTube short. Instead, he was targeting people using the technology to get out of shit like reading and writing emails. “You know who else can do that? Me,” Chieng joked. “If you can’t do that, how useless are you?” 

Taking a more serious tack, Chieng said that AI overuse threatens to damage human creativity, outsourcing the most joyful parts of life. “Creating is the fun part,” Chieng reminded his listeners. “Why would I want AI to take that away from me? The best part of comedy is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away. …It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles.” 

So, yeah: Apparently all you do to not have graduating college students hate your guts is avoid telling them that they have no choice but to sell some of the most important acts of human meaning to The Machine. Who knew?

 

 
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