AI companies are trying even harder to get students addicted to using AI to cheat, so they become dependent on it

[highplainsdem]

They've always targeted students who can be tempted to cheat. It was no accident that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman released ChatGPT for free in November of 2022, a perfect time for students to be offered a free cheating tool that would first be widely and freely used before the end of the school term, then widely and freely discussed on social media - all that free promotion! - over the winter break, when the wonders of a cheating tool wouldn't be competing with summer distractions, and students would be thinking of getting through the spring term. And during that spring term, Sam Altman was out there telling anyone who'd listen that cheating with ChatGPT wasn't really cheating.

Two years later, despite having promoted using their AI for business, OpenAI admitted the majority of their weekly users were still students: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219555859

And in case there's any chance that students won't contine to be lured by the free version of ChatGPT, they're now being offered the premium version for free, for the last two months of the school year. And other AI companies are offering similar freebies to students.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/college-students-free-chatgpt/682532/

Finals season looks different this year. Across college campuses, students are slogging their way through exams with all-nighters and lots of caffeine, just as they always have. But they’re also getting more help from AI than ever before. Through the end of May, OpenAI is offering students two months of free access to ChatGPT Plus, which normally costs $20 a month. It’s a compelling deal for students who want help cramming—or cheating—their way through finals: Rather than firing up the free version of ChatGPT to outsource essay writing or work through a practice chemistry exam, students are now able to access the company’s most advanced models, as well as its “deep research” tool, which can quickly synthesize hundreds of digital sources into analytical reports.

The OpenAI deal is just one of many such AI promotions going around campuses. In recent months, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and Perplexity have also offered students free or significantly discounted versions of their paid chatbots. Some of the campaigns aren’t exactly subtle: “Good luck with finals,” an xAI employee recently wrote alongside details about the company’s deal. Even before the current wave of promotions, college students had established themselves as AI’s power users. “More than any other use case, more than any other kind of user, college-aged young adults in the US are embracing ChatGPT,” the vice president of education at OpenAI noted in a February report. Gen Z is using the technology to help with more than schoolwork; some people are integrating AI into their lives in more fundamental ways: creating personalized workout plans, generating grocery lists, and asking chatbots for romantic advice.

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Today’s giveaways put OpenAI and companies like it only further in the red for now, but maybe not in the long run. After all, Millennials became accustomed to Uber and Lyft, and have stuck with ride-hailing apps even as prices have increased since the start of the pandemic. As students learn to write essays and program computers with the help of AI, they are becoming dependent on the technology. If AI companies can hook young people on their tools now, they may be able to rely on these users to pay up in the future.

Some young people are already hooked. In OpenAI’s recent report on college students’ ChatGPT adoption, the most popular category of non-education or career-related usage was “relationship advice.” In conversations with several younger users, I heard about people who are using AI for color-matching cosmetics, generating customized grocery lists based on budget and dietary preferences, creating personalized audio meditations and half-marathon training routines, and seeking advice on their plant care. When I spoke with Jaidyn-Marie Gambrell, a 22-year-old based in Atlanta, she was in the parking lot at McDonald’s and had just consulted ChatGPT on her order. “I went on ChatGPT and I’m like, ‘Hey girl,’” she said. “‘Do you think it’d be smart for me to get a McChicken?’” The chatbot, which she has programmed to remember her dietary and fitness goals, advised against it. But if she really wanted a sandwich, ChatGPT suggested, she should order the McChicken with no mayo, extra lettuce, tomatoes, and no fries. So that’s what she got.

-snip-

This is your brain on AI - not working even for the simplest decisions without a chatbot's guidance.

[SheltieLover]

1. Kick

[Scrivener7]

2. Cogent self expression is going to go the way of cursive writing.

And cogent self expression is one of the ways we come to know ourselves and our true beliefs and our values.

AI is the devil.

[CrispyQ]

4. It should be called it FAI, for FakeAI.

Certainly there's a better term for what this technology actually is? DRS - Digital Regurgitating Sponge? It absorbs all of humanity's ideas & creativity & then spews it back in some weird way.

[Johonny]

3. This reminds me of my roommate that had his girlfriend

Do his accounting homework for him. I was like, is the company that is going to hire you, hiring her too? A lot of privileged morons goto college and waste the 4 yrs.

[highplainsdem]

7. Those privileged morons usually count on their family to find them a job with a nice salary and title

where underlings will do all or most of their work. Look at Trump.

But heaven help any company that isn't aware they're morons and gives them real responsibilities without assistants to cover for them.

This year we'll be seeing kids graduating who might have been using AI to cheat for the last 2-1/2 years, if they started using it the winter of 2022-23.

They've done surveys that show kids know it's cheating. Know they're not learning as much as they should when they use it.

I saw the CEO of one AI company tell students via Twitter to use AI to cheat to get their degree, and then AI would be their "superpower" after graduation.

[highplainsdem]

6. Google AI Overview is not only wrong much of the time, but it harms the websites it steals information

from, depriving them of traffic and ad dollars.

The same is true of all AI search. Someone relying on AI like ChatGPT for search is going to get a lot of errors.

A student using AI is no more "cheating" than using current periodicals, encyclopedias, or even Wikipedia or YouTube for research.

Completely wrong. There's no comparison between asking AI to give you a research answer and actually doing some reading, which forces you to use your own mind, makes you aware of sources and their reliability, and will usually lead to your learning something beyond what you were originally researching. Even when chatbots provide their sources and quotes and citations, they're notorious for inventing quotes and sources - which you won't know unless you check every one of them.

And if you use AI to write anything for you, you're losing your ability to write and reason and will often end up having what was your opinion swayed by the words the chatbot put in your mouth.

AI is just more time and content efficient.

It isn't time efficient when you have to check for errors, or content efficient when it's wrong.

Whether we like it or not, AI is our future.

If you make it yours, you've chosen to be dumbed down and deskilled. Which is fine with the tech lords peddling AI to you, as they also use it for data gathering and surveillance. You've become their perfect target for advertising and other types of manipulation.

[highplainsdem]

14. I've posted lots of threads on the problems with AI here on DU. You can use the Google

search in the upper right corner of each page to search for

highplainsdem AI

or

highplainsdem ChatGPT

to find some of them.

If you'd donate to DU so you'd be a Star member and able to use Advanced Search here, a search of the Main forums for thread titles mentioning AI that I posted will turn up 250 threads back through November 27, 2023, another 250 between that date and May 26, 2023, and 120-some threads on AI before that, going back through January 2023.

If you choose the search term ChatGPT instead (you can use only one search term in Advanced Search), you'll turn up another hundred or so threads, but that will include some that mention AI as well in the thread title and would have also turned up in the earlier list.

Or you can just google for information on hallucinations and other problems with generative AI or LLMs, the type of AI we're talking about.

Which usually have a warning for users NOT to trust their answers without verifying them. To let the AI companies off the hook for problems those wrong answers create.

[David__77]

10. I agree. It is a tool with strengths and weaknesses like any other.

It doesn’t replace human reason - it’s a tool.

[Mossfern]

9. Rec'd!

A gazillion times.

I was taught by my very erudite uncle back in the day of the dinosaur, before there were computers, how to do research. He was a writer. A person learns so much more than the initial inquiries when doing "hard" research, than getting curated "pat" answers from AI.

I still feel indebted to him for many successes in my life.

[womanofthehills]

11. What I like about doing research on Groc 3

You can argue with Groc if you don’t like its answer and ask for more in-depth research and it will keep looking. Also -it will give you 10 articles/reports
about whatever you ask about.

I live 40/50 miles from Trinity site and asked Groc about plutonium in my neighborhood- way more info than I ever found online & I’m a good researcher.

Photography is the most fun of all on Groc - I can just type in / put a running Javalina wearing a kitty mask in my photo and it does.

[highplainsdem]

15. Grok, like all the major generative AI models, was illegally trained on all the intellectual property that

could be stolen. It's always unethical to use these tools if you have a choice not to.

And Grok makes plenty of mistakes, just like all genAI.

https://democraticunderground.com/100220047814

https://democraticunderground.com/100219988602

[dickthegrouch]

12. It is ARTIFICIAL

In no way is it intelligent.
It is programmed and cannot make intuitive leaps based on the data it was trained with.
IMHO AI is another huge scam on the world. In its infancy and as reliable as any other four year old.
Anciano wants examples backed by evidence; if I ask AI to write those examples, they’d be utterly hypocritical if they believed them without researching for themselves the veracity of those answers.

[highplainsdem]

16. If you hadn't apparently already gotten out of the habit of using search engines, you could have found

search results with lots of such examples as quickly as you posted a demand that they be provided to you.

If you'd simply googled

ai overview hallucination example news stories

you'd've found lots of articles about them.

[highplainsdem]

18. Personal jab? You said you use AI Overview and ChatGPT for research.

[highplainsdem]

20. Well, you've apparently already been ignoring everything posted on DU by myself and others

about the unreliability of AI. And all the news stories about it. And even the warnings that come with the AI tools about AI making mistakes, so you need to check the results. So this isn't much of a change on your part.

But I hope for your sake you won't ever be harmed, or inadvertently end up causing harm, due to incorrect answers from an AI. Especially since the AI companies insist they shouldn't be held responsible for their AI tools' mistakes, and they do have those warnings trying to absolve themselves of all legal liability.