As finals season creeps up on us once again, hundreds of thousands of students around the country are scrambling to catch up on ten weeks’ worth of material. A saving grace for many people has been OpenAI’s free chatbot, ChatGPT. ChatGPT was released in October 2022, with over 37.5 million searches per day. In March, ChatGPT released a statement that promised all college students free ChatGPT Plus from March 31st until the end of May. While ChatGPT is free, the premium version of the bot offers things like image generation, voice conversation, and faster response speeds, which usually run for $20/month. While this can be framed as a generous offer by the heads of ChatGPT, the company has been candid about the size of the financial losses they’ve experienced over the last year. In 2024, the company lost over $5 billion. From the hefty $3 billion cost to train the bots to the $700 million in salaries, the company is struggling to make a profit from its free program. Most of their revenue comes from their ChatGPT paid subscribers. So, why is it that it remains free, especially for college students?
Just like everything, there is a cost here that ChatGPT is not being candid about. In a free market, anything and everything has an opportunity cost. All of us, as students, work hard for 4 years or more to get into a college, and pay tens of thousands each year to have access to this education. So, if we are paying for our education, and that education is making us valuable members of the workforce, then why are we giving it to ChatGPT for free? The reason is that the cost that is not laid out clearly for us is the cost of our futures. AI training has been compared to raising a child. The things it learns early on are hard to unlearn and may significantly influence what happens later on. When you understand the things that the advertisements don’t tell you, the reason becomes a lot clearer about why college students are being targeted. For free, we are training this chatbot to know exactly what we do, feeding it the prompts that require us to put the knowledge we’ve paid for into practice. Maybe, in return, we get a free study partner or a homework buddy, but is that worth the cost? This thing is doing the work for us so we can breeze through school, but when we get out of it, who is the one that has the information? Who is the one who gets asked about a problem in the workplace? If you think it’ll still be you, unfortunately, you are wrong. As the economy continues to be prioritized over the climate, and workers’ rights are rapidly stripped back as technology launches forward, the AI bot that you spoon-fed your $100k degree to will replace you, and there will be nowhere else to go. Over 64% of users who use ChatGPT come from low-income households, and the benefits ChatGPT has on education accessibility are undeniable. However, putting a band-aid over a gaping hole will never let it heal; it only allows you to forget that it was ever there. While ChatGPT may be, in the short run, leveling the playing field, in the long run, it is doing the exact opposite.
The glaring bureaucracy of higher education will not be mended by ChatGPT. Despite how convenient it might feel, it is preying on the desperation you feel to be relieved of the academic burden you have little choice other than to take on. ChatGPT knows that convenience is addictive, and it knows that no one in the world despises comfort. Day by day, new models of AI emerge that are more powerful – and more expensive – than ever. In the end, the people that benefit from AI will not be students, or teachers, or anyone else whose job it is to think. Maybe you get that assignment out of the way quicker than you could have without it, but on the other end, that assignment is being scooped up and added to the pile of information that is being harvested to replace you. A company is losing money to give this to you for free because, in the long run, they will make all that money back when companies hire them instead of you. The cost is not monetary, but humanitarian. The robot that took your place in school is going to follow you for the rest of your life and take your place wherever you go. So, next time you have that physics problem that you need help on, have that essay you forgot about, or that test you didn’t study for, think twice before mindlessly copy and pasting it into ChatGPT. Walk the mile, take the L, instead of hiring a robot to run it for you. Don’t let the muscles of your mind deteriorate just because it’s easier right now. The moral of the story is always: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
You are more valuable than a robot, so prove it.