A cautionary tale for the Class of 2026

Brett Freeman

Congratulations to the Class of 2026. You deserve every celebration coming your way.

But as we send this year’s graduates into the world, we should be honest about the world they are entering.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming the jobs many of them have been told to pursue.

I spent part of Father’s Day talking about AI with two of my cousins. One is a cardiologist. He told me how AI is already changing the way he practices medicine. He is no longer sitting after every appointment typing notes into a computer. His conversations with patients are recorded and transcribed.

Soon, he said, the software will become even more advanced. If he tells a patient during an appointment that they need a particular test, the AI will place the order.

We joked, darkly, that the AI was trying to make him obsolete. That was an exaggeration, of course. At least for now. But it was not hard to see where this is heading, especially for the array of assistants and receptionists that you see at every doctor's office.

My other conversation was with a cousin who has had tremendous success in the technology world. He recently became an owner of a well-known digital platform. When he and his partners first bought the business, the company had 40 software engineers on staff. Today, there are three.

My cousin told me that when he wants to add a feature to an app, he can describe what he wants and AI will produce the code.

So what should a high school graduate do with that information? Will there be engineering jobs for those interested in a STEM major? The answer, I think, is yes, but the reason for learning the craft may be changing.

The same is true for writing.

I have no doubt that AI has made me a better writer. It has also changed my writing process.

I used to write slowly. Painfully slowly. I would polish sentences as I wrote them.

That is no longer how I write. Now I free write, which is something I resisted as a student. I get my thoughts on the screen and I worry less about whether the first version is polished.

AI has made that possible. One of the stranger things I have noticed is that AI has not only changed how quickly I write. It may be changing how I write. At first, I thought AI was learning to sound more like me. But I have also begun to wonder whether I am learning to sound more like AI. When a machine shows me a more polished way to express an idea, I naturally absorb some of that.

But here is the important part: AI has not eliminated judgment or taste. And if everyone has access to polished prose, then polished prose is no longer enough. The value is in the thinking behind it.

That is why schools need to rethink how they are handling AI.

I understand why teachers are worried. AI can be used to cheat. But treating AI mostly as a disciplinary problem would be a mistake.

The technology is here. It is not going away. And the students who learn how to use it honestly, creatively and intelligently will have a major advantage over those who are told simply to avoid it.

So, how do you become an expert in your field while using a tool that can imitate expertise before you have earned it? That may be one of the great educational questions of our time.

One obvious response is to put students in a classroom, give them a prompt and ask them to write by hand in a blue book. Make sure they can think, organize an argument and express themselves without a machine doing it for them.

But schools also need to teach students how to use AI while they are still developing those skills. A student who uses AI to avoid thinking is cheating himself. A student who uses AI to sharpen his work, test his thinking, expose weak spots and learn faster may be preparing for the world he is actually going to live in.

The danger is that AI can sound authoritative even when it is wrong. Anyone who uses these tools regularly has seen it happen. AI can produce wrong information with enormous confidence.

That does not make AI useless. It makes AI more like a very smart, very fast, imperfect assistant.

You would not hand your business to an assistant and say, “Do whatever you think is best.” You would bring your own knowledge, judgment and experience to the final decision.

The human being still has to be in charge and know enough to recognize when the machine is wrong. That means expertise still matters.

At Halston Media, I have only begun to scratch the surface of what AI can do. In the years ahead, I will be looking for people who know how to harness it.

But let's be real. If one person with the right tools can do what once required a team, more people will be able to build their own businesses, create their own jobs and bring their own ideas into the world.

That is exciting for some people, but may be terrifying for others, as not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.

There is another lesson here, too. For all the attention we give to college degrees and white-collar careers, we sometimes have a distorted view of success. We assume the impressive path is the one with the prestigious title or the fancy degree. But the most successful person on your block may very well be the electrician, plumber, builder or mechanic who mastered a trade, built a business, employed others and became indispensable. And it will be a very long time before a chatbot shows up at your house and fixes a burst pipe.

So my advice to graduates is not simply to learn AI. It is to become harder to replace. Do not let AI become a substitute for your own mind.

Use it as a study partner. Use it as an assistant that can help you move faster. But never forget that the assistant is not the boss. You are.

That is the cautionary tale for the Class of 2026.

You are graduating into a world where intelligence itself has been mechanized. But AI cannot decide what kind of person you should become. That remains your job.

And it may be the most important job you will ever have.