Your AI Wise Professor is of Course… A Robot with a Book

And of course, ALL professors wear ties.

This is the featured image chosen to align with a Venture Beat “piece” (I can’t use “article” or “news item: as there are so many ads on the screen I can barely read the text) called:

OpenAI just made ChatGPT Plus free for millions of college students — and it’s a brilliant competitive move against Anthropic

OpenAI has made its premium ChatGPT Plus subscription free for all college students in the United States and Canada through the end of May, a move announced Thursday that intensifies the competition with rival Anthropic for dominance in higher education.

The offer gives millions of students free access to OpenAI’s $20-per-month premium service just as they prepare for final exams, providing capabilities like GPT-4o (OpenAI’s most advanced large language model), image generation, voice interaction, and advanced research tools that aren’t available in the free version.

Free! For almost two months through finals in North America, and then they come knocking for the students credit card once they have ChatGPTed through their exams and finals.

“Today’s college students face enormous pressure to learn faster, tackle harder problems, and enter a workforce increasingly shaped by AI,” said Leah Belsky, Vice President of Education at OpenAI, in a statement. “Supporting their AI literacy means more than demonstrating how these tools work. It requires creating space for students to engage directly, experiment, learn from peers, and ask their own questions.”

This is so noble of “Open”AI! Arent they lovely people?

This image– the robot professor wearing a tie. It’s got all the chlichés of education lifted from a 1980s TV show. There are clues in the file name, if you bother to look:

nuneybits_Vector_art_of_college_professor_who_is_a_
robot_cf1ea93e-cb28-42c5-ad9f-bfdf62b71d0a.webp

I as curious on “nuneybits” where a search through the old means that some say are broken, leads directly to a Hugging Face profile for Michael Nunez who is the author of the Venture Beat piece.

So as much as I have been thionking that the proliferation of Sadly Robotic Metaphors is a product of crappy AI, it’s really the lack of imagination of those sitting at the empty prompt box. You get what you ask for. “Vector art of college professor who is a robot”.

People generate this crap. And People decided to use it. Don’t be one of those People.