Artificial Intelligence

ChatGpt goes to university, big tech's promotion to get students to use Ai

Two free months of the pro version to help US and Canadian students prepare for spring exams. So Ai is on its way to a university professorship.

22 April 2025

3' min read

The machines have entered the universities. OpenAI has launched a promotion, valid only in the United States and Canada, that allows college students to use the plus version of ChatGpt for two months for free.

The offer falls right on the occasion of the spring exams. Indeed, university students can access the advanced artificial intelligence model free of charge from 31 March 2025 to 31 May.

"This is an experimental consumer programme and we may extend it to other schools and countries over time," reads the official OpenAi page.

According to the company, students would be able to use ChatGpt plus to upload pdf documents and ask the artificial intelligence to summarise the content or give them a customised quiz. The offer promises the student hours of time savings by delegating the task of detailed online research and reports to the Ai. Artificial intelligence can also support study through brainstorming and writing prompts for the preparation of essays or papers.

Big tech in the running for a university chair

OpenAi is in good company. Many big tech companies have entered the race for a place in the world of education. Elon Musk's xAI is offering students two months free access to SuperGrok, the premium version of its chatbot Grok 3. As reported by The Atlantic newspaper, an xAI employee recently wrote "Good luck on your final exams" on X sponsoring the promotional initiative aimed at students.

Google, on the other hand, made the Google One Ai premium plan available free of charge for US university students until the spring exams in 2026

"The context in which these initiatives take place is one of competition both in terms of the quality of the models that are developed and the aggregation of as many users as possible. And the target is precisely the students,' points out Fabio Giglietto, full professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the University of Urbino 'Carlo Bo'. Giglietto is the contact person for the 'Vera Ai' project, which seeks to create artificial intelligence solutions against disinformation.

There are also genuine educational programmes designed specifically for schools. Anthropic introduced 'Claude for Education', a version of its chatbot designed specifically for academic use.

Perplexity until 31 May offers a free month of the pro version to students who register with a university institutional email. If more than five hundred students from the same university register, the entire university community gets Perplexity Pro free for one year

"These models," Giglietto continues, "need to maintain the flow of content, thanks to the use these users make of the platforms. Increasingly, they can upload their own documents, their own reports, their own articles. This is how the model can continue to train'.

The business scheme of these companies is clear: hook the user through a free trial of the paid version and then, once they can no longer do without it, retain them to the pro version so that they become customers.

With Ai, study methods change and inequalities among students arise

Accustoming children to the use of Ai from a very early stage means laying a good foundation for creating adults who are increasingly familiar with this technology. And perhaps totally dependent on it.

But one must also come to terms with reality. "Students would use these models anyway, probably the free versions," Giglietto comments. "The kids I deal with now struggle to read a whole book. They would rely on a summary or the notes of the lecture they took anyway," he continues.

"Unfortunately, the old days are gone, students today have these characteristics. The teacher can also use these models to direct them to read more, if he is clear about the purpose he wants to go towards and if he has been trained to use these technologies".

Useless to oppose, therefore. It is necessary to look carefully at the effects that the use of these models generates. A little-known aspect is the social inequalities caused by the clearly superior capabilities of the paid version compared to the free one.

"In our classes, we have students who can afford to buy subscriptions and can therefore use these models for longer and with much higher quality," Giglietto continues. "On the other hand, we have students who, for a mere question of access capacity, have to make do with less powerful models. The consequence is that we give instruments of different power in the hands of different groups, and the differences in terms of performance are very clear.

If it is impossible to escape a future in which artificial intelligence will be integrated into human life as early as the education system, it is not so to think of policies that make its use more equitable and controlled.