Anti-AIPerson

Ronny Chieng

Comedian

Malaysian-born comedian, actor, and senior Daily Show correspondent. In his 2026 Harvard Class Day address he turned a furious, profane riff against generative AI into a rallying cry, telling the graduating class that destroying AI is the mission of their generation.

Comedian Actor Entertainment

Harvard Gazette Wikipedia

In his words

Fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI. I’m so glad you agree.

— Harvard Class Day address, May 27, 2026

I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI.

— Harvard Class Day address, May 27, 2026

Biography

Ronny Chieng (born 1985) is a Malaysian-born comedian and actor who has become one of comedy’s most quotable AI skeptics. A former lawyer turned stand-up, he is a senior correspondent on The Daily Show and has appeared in films including Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and M3GAN, alongside a run of acclaimed Netflix comedy specials.

Invited to address Harvard’s Class Day on May 27, 2026 — the eve of Commencement — Chieng used the podium to channel a broader cultural anxiety about generative AI into a blunt, profane charge. Where many commencement speakers that season urged graduates to master AI for the future, he framed the technology not as a tool to be mastered but as something to be opposed outright, and the graduating class roared its approval.

Ronny Chieng’s Harvard Class Day 2026 address (clip starts at the AI segment).

His position was not entirely one-dimensional: he told the Class of 2026 to apply AI to hard problems in medicine and physics — “if you’re using it for that purpose, you’re not the problem” — but never as a substitute for creativity or critical thinking. Citing MIT’s 2025 “Your Brain on ChatGPT” study, he warned of “the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models,” and predicted a coming divide between “mastery versus faking it.” The comic’s deepest point was about joy, not fear.

The creating is the fun part… Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it.

— Harvard Class Day address — Harvard Gazette, May 2026

The speech landed because it said out loud what a lot of the room felt — that the AI rollout had been done to them rather than with them. A clip spread quickly online, the Boston Globe reported days of praise for the address, and Chieng joined fellow comedians like Adam Conover on the shortlist of comedy’s most effective AI critics.