In a development that surprises precisely no one, commencement speakers for the class of 2026 are being subtly advised to steer clear of AI talk, a subject that reportedly causes viewers to glaze over faster than a Zoom meeting on a Friday afternoon. With the future supposedly 'shaped by AI,' graduates are asked to please focus on more exciting traditional topics like, well, literally anything else.
Ignoring AI's thrill potential might seem counterintuitive (because it is), given how the tech industry once marketed it as the guiding force for the next golden age. But as students finally emerge from academia's cocoon, they've shuffled past AI and quietly left it with last year's Jorts trend and 2006's hottest Myspace layouts.
“All of us here at the Leading Institute of Artificial Advancement dreamed of a future powered by AI,” opined our enthusiastic dean of technological optimism, Dr. Cy Blase. “But as students repeatedly muted my bold AI vision over their bingo cards, I realized it might not be the crowd-pleaser we anticipated.”
It's a hard time for AI advocates as they brace themselves for collective eye-rolls and thin applause. A word to wise and exhausted commencement speakers: if your AI quip causes a noticeable drop in blood pressure within your audience, perhaps it's time to pivot to the next best crowd-pleaser, like whispering 'wave of the future' and then quickly changing the topic to vegan donuts.
Thus, the greatest lesson imparted to 2026's graduates lies not in bytes and machine learning, but in the realization that, sometimes, silence (on AI) is indeed golden.