“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy A-I. Kill it. To accomplish this, you’ll have to capture and reprogram an A-I to be on the side of humanity, then commandeer its own time-traveling technology, send it back to the past to defeat the current A-I before it gains sentience. This isn’t just graduation day, this is Terminator 2 Judgment Day.”
“And I know, I know there’s someone sitting out here right now who’s just like, “Well, you know, what about the use of A-I to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?” Well, first of all, shut up, nerd. I’m not talking about that. Obviously, if you’re using it for that purpose, you’re not the problem, okay? I’m talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models according to a study by MIT published in 2025 in Archives.”
“Look, this is actually good news, okay? This is why you guys shouldn’t be scared of AI, because I think AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They’re always like, “Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and drop a response?” Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. 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.”
“From what I can see, getting an actual advantage from AI in the future will require a minimum escape velocity of intelligence that I’m assuming you guys from Harvard have. Everyone else who can’t match that is just going to get dumber, and that’s when you run up the score on them, assuming we still have a functioning society, of course.”
“Untalented people love bragging about using AI to help them draft their speeches and their scripts and their podcasts and their promo videos for UFC fights at the White House, which to be fair, even if they had filmed that for real, it would still have looked like AI. But what they’re missing is this. The creating is the fun part. The best part of comedy writing is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me?”
“You know what problem I want A-I to solve? I want the problem of AI making everything look like shit. I want AI to solve that problem. How about that?”
Ronny Chieng, 2026
There are so many truth bombs being laid out here. There’s such a degree of humour that it’s hard to take it seriously. And yet, so much of what Ronny Chieng said at Harvard was absolute truth. As guest speaker at Harvard’s Class Day as part of their Commencement 2026, Comedian Ronny Chieng took to the stage and laid it all out. You can read the full transcript here: https://singjupost.com
A couple of weeks a go I began to get ads in my feed advertising the latest education AI build. “Get your Sundays back” it said, hinting that teachers spend their Sundays planning, and that instead of doing that, AI could do it for you, or make it so you don’t spend your entire Sunday planning.
The reality is, I choose to do my planning on Sunday, for a number of reasons. In my early career, I used to do my planning throughout the week for the following week. On Wednesday afternoon after 3pm, I would make the Maths plan. Thursday was Reading and Writing, and Friday was for everything else.
The problem was, by the time Monday came around, things had changed. Maybe on Friday we didn’t get through the work I thought we would of, and so adjustments would have to be made. What’s more, on Monday morning I would have to look at the plan to refresh my memory; given I was operating from a plan devised in the middle of teaching the plan I’d devised the week prior.
For a long time I refused to do planning in the weekend. One, I wanted to preserve the weekend for myself and my family. Two, as a Christian, Sunday was hands off for anything work related as I observe a day of rest.
I’m not sure what changed, but for whatever reason I made my day of rest Saturday, which is traditionally the Sabbath anyway, allowing me to complete my planning on Sunday. It transformed my entire workload. Things were more clear, with the week before being complete, and I could plan from where we left off exactly, rather than adjusting things if we didn’t get as much done as was hoped. But the biggest payoff by far was the retention of the plan in my head. No longer did I have two days of family time creating a mental block between my plan I made last week and what I had to teach this week. The plan from Sunday flowed into the teaching of Monday, and rarely did I have to look at my planning. Now, if I have all my resources sorted for the week, it is very rare I have to even look at my planning. Usually it’s just a quick reminder of any anomalies to the routine.
So, no. I won’t bow to the suggestion of getting my Sunday’s back. I use Sunday’s for reasons. Reasons that make my job easier, not harder.
I’ve made a conscious decision to limit my use of A.I. Especially when it comes to teaching. Those that know me, know that I enjoy making things look nice. I’m fairly particular in how I want things to look like. This ranges from resources, to classroom displays, to Powerpoints and even unit plans.
Using AI to do things like resource creation is problematic. Not because the resource is made in next to no time, but because it doesn’t end up looking like I want it to. I then have to modify and adjust the design to my liking, rather than just beginning with a blank canvas and doing it myself. Secondly, I nearly never remember anything that A.I. has done – certainly not to the degree that I remember things if I make it myself. The brain just doesn’t process it the same. The sentiments of Ronny Chieng ring true.
“The creating is the fun part. The best part of comedy writing is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me?”
“Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They’re always like, “Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and drop a response?” Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can’t do that? How useless are you?”
When I tried to utilise AI to formulate my Maths planning of three groups using a widely used resource, I found I had to double-check what it had come up with, and then spent twice as much time adjusting the prompt and asking A.I. to recreate it. By the time I’d finished, it would have been quicker, if not about the same amount of time to have just made it myself – and I would have the added bonus of being able to recall what I had made without necessarily having to re-read it all.
Having A.I. make and create planning might require no brain power and minimal time spent initially, but at some point I will have to spend that time reading it and understanding it in order to teach what it has planned for me to teach.
For me, if you begin to rely on A.I. for these tasks, you are going to lose those skills that are an important part of teaching. The creativity. The organisation. The logistics. The resource knowledge. The autonomy. As Chieng said – Why would you want AI to take that away from you?
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