On Super Bowl Sunday, 128.2 million people tuned in to watch Bad Bunny deliver a heartfelt performance celebrating Puerto Rican and greater Latin American culture. The performance was rife with underlying meaning and concluded with a bold billboard that read “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love.” But once Bad Bunny walked offstage the screen changed, pivoting to a Svedka vodka commercial featuring disco dancing robots.
There was something very jarring about the Svedka advertisement; beyond the in-your-face consumerism and blatant sexualization of the female-presenting robot, the entire video was clearly made with generative AI. It wasn’t the only one. Almost a quarter of the advertisements booked for the Super Bowl were made with or were selling AI. They touched on a variety of subjects from impressing a date to finding a lost dog, collectively arguing that artificial intelligence is your friend.
It’s such a good friend that it will spend a small fortune to convince you so. At $8 million a pop, Super Bowl commercials are an investment into potential user bases. Every reassurance that AI is a quirky, fun helper to what humans are already up to is an effort to distract from the reality that artificial intelligence systems are big tech companies. Businesses have one true love: the bottom line. These tools aren’t designed to help you. They’re designed to make money.
What’s more, they’re succeeding. OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, is worth a whopping $500 billion, making it the most valuable private company in the world. Its CEO, Sam Altman, has a net worth of $3 billion and champions using AI to benefit all of humanity from his three mansions. “Benefit[ing] all of humanity” is the official mission statement of OpenAI, which it notably dropped “safety” from in 2024. This small shift in wording signals a large shift in company goals which consumers will inevitably feel the effects of.
A not-so-subtle shift in OpenAI’s operations just hit users. Advertisements are being added to the free version of ChatGPT, its most popular model. It’s the latest move in OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. While OpenAI claims that personal user data will not be sold to advertisers, the ads will be personalized to each user from their prior searches. Just like the familiar warning that anything you post on social media sticks around forever, everything you type into the chatbot has a digital footprint. With hopes to triple their $13 billion yearly revenue, the boost that this new feature will incur rings louder than any of OpenAI’s claims to serve humanity.
Knowledge is power, and money is power. However, the overlap between money and knowledge is complicated. The matter is further tangled in the realm of education, which was one of generative AI’s first battlegrounds. ChatGPT rose in popularity among students as a form of cheating, but its growth outpaced educators’ efforts to deter students from it. Now, schools are giving into the pressure of its expanding user base and embracing artificial intelligence technology.
OpenAI has been pushing for a foothold on college campuses. This is not out of a passion for education but rather is a strategy for competition with other AI companies. Innovation in education is a noble cause that tech companies will not hesitate to exploit for profit. School-supported AI systems are largely unexplored territory, and it remains to be seen whether they will truly help students in the long run or deter their ability to learn on their own.
The pressure to stay current by integrating generative AI tools into the classroom is likely informed by the buzz of the mounting investments in their parent companies rather than the functionality of the tools themselves. ChatGPT is not essential to education; it can do nothing that humans could not do first. We are the ones who taught it, not the other way around.
It feels like AI is everywhere. But just because these tools are readily available doesn’t mean you have to or even should use them. Before you ask ChatGPT for help, think about whether you want that query shuffled off to advertisers or linked to your online presence. Remember that in-person resources like a friend or professor will offer help without worrying about profit. What isn’t broken doesn’t need fixing.