Ronny Chieng told Harvard graduates on Wednesday to treat artificial intelligence like a tool for research, not a substitute for the part of work that makes it worth doing. Speaking at Class Day in Tercentenary Theatre, he urged the Class of 2026 to keep AI out of the creative and critical-thinking jobs that shape a career, and used the kind of blunt line that tends to follow him: the mission of their generation, he said, is to destroy AI.

People were searching for his remarks because they landed at Harvard’s Class Day, during the university’s 375th Commencement period, in front of students about to leave school and start their first jobs. Chieng, a comedian and television correspondent with three Netflix specials behind him, also told the graduates that the technology should be applied to research in medicine and physics, drawing a line between limited use and surrendering too much to the machine.

He anchored that warning in a 2025 MIT study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” which found that overreliance on language learning models can create cognitive debt. From there, Chieng turned the caution into a joke and a challenge, saying of routine email-reading and answering, “You know who else can do that? Me,” before adding that the better course is the more personal one. The point was not that AI has no place at all; it was that graduates should keep the enjoyable, judgment-heavy part of their work for themselves.

That friction is what made the speech more than a simple anti-tech riff. Chieng said AI can help in medicine and physics research, even as he argued that it should never replace creativity and critical thinking. In his telling, the fight is not over whether the tool exists, but over whether young professionals hand over the parts of their jobs that give them substance, mastery and taste.

Harvard’s Class Day is an annual celebration of graduating students and includes student speeches along with a guest speaker invited by the class. Nicholas S. Kalkanis ’26 introduced Chieng, while David Deming and David Battat also offered remarks. Chieng, who grew up in Singapore and spent part of his childhood in Manchester, New Hampshire, studied commerce and law at the University of Melbourne and has also appeared in “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Kung Fu Panda 4.” For the Class of 2026, the message was plain: use the machine where it helps, but do not let it take the fun part away.