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ChatGPT is Actively Marketing to Students During University Finals Season

It’s really disheartening and honestly kind of telling that in spite of everything, ChatGPT is actively marketing itself to students in the run-up to college finals season.

We’ve talked many (many) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to systems built by people who have repeatedly, doggedly proven that they will a) buy into their own hype and b) refuse to ever question their own biases and hubris. But additionally, there’s been at least two papers in the past few months alone, and more in the last two years (1, 2, 3), demonstrating that over-reliance on “AI” tools diminishes critical thinking capacity and prevents students from building the kinds of foundational skills which allow them to learn more complex concepts, adapt to novel situations, and grow into experts.

Screenshot of ChatpGPT page:ChaptGPT Promo: 2 months free for students ChatGPT Plus is now free for college students through May Offer valid for students in the US and Canada [Buttons reading "Claim offer" and "learn more" An image of a pencil scrawling a scribbly and looping line] ChatGPT Plus is here to help you through finals

Screenshot of ChatGPT[.]com/students showing an introductory offer for college students during finals; captured 04/04/2025

That lack of expertise and capacity has a direct impact on people’s ability to discern facts, produce knowledge, and even participate in civic/public life. The diminishment of critical thinking skills makes people more susceptible to propaganda and other forms of dis- and misinformation— problems which, themselves, are already being exacerbated by the proliferation of “Generative AI” text and image systems and people not fulling understanding them for the bullshit engines they are.

The abovementioned susceptibility allows authoritarian-minded individuals and groups to thus further degrade belief in shared knowledge and consensus reality and to erode trust in expertise, thus exacerbating and worsening the next turn on the cycle when it starts all over again.

All of this creates the very conditions by which authoritarians seek to cement their control: by undercutting the individual tools and social mechanisms which can empower the populace to understand and challenge the kinds of damage dictators, theocrats, fascists, and kleptocrats seek to do on the path to enriching themselves and consolidating power.

And here’s OpenAI flagrantly encouraging said over-reliance. The original post on linkedIn even has an image of someone prompting ChatGPT to guide them on “mastering [a] calc 101 syllabus in two weeks.” So that’s nice.

No wait; the other thing… Terrible. It’s terrible.

View Kate Rouch’s graphic linkKate RouchKate Rouch • 3rd+Premium • 3rd+ Chief Marketing Officer at OpenAI.Chief Marketing Officer at OpenAI. 21h • Edited • 21 hours ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn ChatGPT Plus is free during finals! We can’t achieve our mission without empowering young people to use AI. Fittingly, today we launched our first scaled marketing campaign. The campaign shows students different ways to take advantage of ChatGPT as they study, work out, try to land jobs, and plan their summers. It also offers ChatGPT Plus’s more advanced capabilities to students for free through their finals. You’ll see creative on billboards, digital ads, podcasts, and more throughout the coming weeks. We hope you learn something useful! If you’re a college student in the US or Canada, you can claim the offer at www.chatgpt.com/students

Screenshot of a linkedIn post from OpenAI’s chief marketing officer. Captured 04/04/2025

Understand this. Push back against it. Reject its wholesale uncritical adoption and proliferation. Demand a more critical and nuanced stance on “AI” from yourself, from your representatives at every level, and from every company seeking to shove this technology down our throats.

Kirsten and I spent the week between the 17th and the 21st of September with 18 other utterly amazing people having Chatham House Rule-governed conversations about the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

We were in Norway, in the Juvet Landscape Hotel, which is where they filmed a lot of the movie Ex Machina, and it is even more gorgeous in person. None of the rooms shown in the film share a single building space. It’s astounding as a place of both striking architectural sensibility and also natural integration as they built every structure in the winter to allow the dormancy cycles of the plants and animals to dictate when and where they could build, rather than cutting anything down.

And on our first full day here, Two Ravens flew directly over my and Kirsten’s heads.

Yes.

[Image of a rainbow rising over a bend in a river across a patchy overcast sky, with the river going between two outcropping boulders, trees in the foreground and on either bank and stretching off into the distance, and absolutely enormous mountains in the background]

I am extraordinarily grateful to Andy Budd and the other members of the Clear Left team for organizing this, and to Cennydd Bowles for opening the space for me to be able to attend, and being so forcefully enthused about the prospect of my attending that he came to me with a full set of strategies in hand to get me to this place. That kind of having someone in your corner means the world for a whole host of personal reasons, but also more general psychological and socially important ones, as well.

I am a fortunate person. I am a person who has friends and resources and a bloody-minded stubbornness that means that when I determine to do something, it will more likely than not get fucking done, for good or ill.

I am a person who has been given opportunities to be in places many people will never get to see, and have conversations with people who are often considered legends in their fields, and start projects that could very well alter the shape of the world on a massive scale.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a grandiose statement, but you’re here reading this, and so you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

I am a person who tries to pay forward what I have been given and to create as many spaces for people to have the opportunities that I have been able to have.

I am not a monetarily wealthy person, measured against my society, but my wealth and fortune are things that strike me still and make me take stock of it all and what it can mean and do, all over again, at least once a week, if not once a day, as I sit in tension with who I am, how the world perceives me, and what amazing and ridiculous things I have had, been given, and created the space to do, because and in violent spite of it all.

So when I and others come together and say we’re going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected BY the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds, then we are going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected by the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds.

So let’s talk about what that means.

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