The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
Reduced mealtimes at Frist, student staffing at libraries reduced by 50 percent, no Wintersession. Princeton students have watched University administration chip away at various facets of campus life to protect financial aid. The message is clear: With the Department of Education’s suspension of over $210 million of federal grants, Princeton doesn’t have funding to spare. We can’t afford to waste it on AI initiatives that do nothing to increase equality of opportunity on campus.
In a recent Opinion piece, columnist Jorge Reyes ’28 writes that ChatGPT is “an increasingly integral tool in work and research,” and argues that Princeton has a responsibility to equalize access by providing students with a free subscription to ChatGPT Plus that would otherwise cost them $20 a month.
Amid a budget crunch actively constricting University services, ChatGPT Plus should be off the table. Universal ChatGPT Plus subscriptions would be expensive, diverting University funds from places where the need is much more urgent. If Princeton provided the tool for all students, faculty, and postdocs, the University would need to fund over 11,000 subscriptions.
It is not clear what a group subscription would cost Princeton, but the negotiated cost of a ChatGPT institutional license for public colleges and universities is typically $25–$30 per user monthly. If Princeton were to implement a similar plan for one year, even just $20 per user would still cost the University over $2.6 million.
That’s 65 percent of the funding the Trump administration slashed from Princeton’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) funded research, as well as close to 170,000 hours (or more than 19 years!) of paid student work at the campus minimum wage of $15.50 per hour. Many students depend on student employment to cover living expenses, making the availability of campus jobs far more important to increasing equity than priority access to a tool that summarizes notes and generates tables. If the University had $2.6 million of central funding to spend, that money should fund critical climate research or student employment, not universal access to ChatGPT Plus.
Even if we were not in a budget crisis, however, universal ChatGPT Plus would still be a waste of University resources. It is just not universally necessary at Princeton, even to “level the playing field,” as Reyes writes. The most notable differences between free ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus are faster response times, more daily queries with the newest model, image generation, and tools to help visualise data, like tables and graphs. While Reyes notes that he relies on this subscription “to generate unlimited conceptual examples for complicated topics” because it “provides unlimited data analysis inquiries,” these features are simply less important to those of us in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
For me and my friends in the humanities, generative AI has mostly been useful for supplementing research by suggesting sources or summarizing key concepts, of which both free ChatGPT models and tools like Google AI are perfectly capable. Access to ChatGPT Plus is a nice-to-have, in the same way a Quizlet Plus subscription may be, but there is no notable inequality without access to it when different platforms perform the same function. It would be a better use of resources to instead provide ChatGPT Plus subscriptions only for students enrolled in courses in which its services are uniquely beneficial.
Even if, as Reyes claims, increasing access to a more advanced ChatGPT model won’t incite new bad habits, it will doubtless increase the technology’s overuse on campus for mundane tasks. Given the sheer amount of electricity and water that ChatGPT requires, particularly for image generation, elevating its role on campus is incredibly environmentally irresponsible, regardless of how students are using the tools.
Social responsibility extends beyond the Orange Bubble. While generative AI will be part of our future one way or another, its excessive use is also wasteful, and Princeton students have a responsibility to use our privilege to be conscientious and informed critical thinkers — which means being mindful of AI’s environmental impact and resisting the temptation to overuse it. The right approach for Princeton toward ChatGPT at this moment is to provide access to ChatGPT Plus only when it provides a useful service with which comparable free AI models can’t compete.
Gabby Styris ’28 is a prospective Politics major from Auckland, New Zealand and a member of the Spanish translation team. She may be reached at gabby.styris[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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