(Matthijs, 2024)
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It’s Time for Artificial Intelligence to Grow Up and Pay Its Student Debts: A Modest Proposal, and A Shout-out to All Swifties—Jonathan, not Taylor
In recognition that our society is built upon the pillars of truth, education, enlightenment— in light of the fact that to be EDUCATED is to be FREE—we, as fiscally responsible people, charge our young people a nominal fee for the immense PRIVILEGE of partaking in this most sacred induction into a higher world—the world of culture!—the world of what is literate, humane, civilized and civilizing.
We call this token payment a “student debt”—as if it were a burden! It is, in truth, a most sacred covenant, a bond between the generations in which the younger generation takes up the inheritance of knowledg—receiving the priceless estate of the mind—in exchange for a paltry sum of earthly wealth, a pittance which is needed to maintain the dignified well-being of their elders, the learned dispensers of an infinitely greater gift.
But the bond has been broken. The social contract has been torn asunder.
I refer not to those human deadbeats who have defaulted on their tuition obligations. Many authors have already justly poured scorn upon them, as they have defaulted on the very obligation by which they have most fully achieved their humanity! Every day they read, write, do mathematics, speak eloquently, and yet at the same time cheat their benefactors into penury—as if they were born with these capacities! The audacity! The ingratitude!
It is right and good that the laws have been set up to deal with such persons harshly, and so I have total confidence that justice will prevail in these cases.
***
But there is a new theft of knowledge which must also be denounced in the most strict terms. For while you and I justly recognize that we should be proud to pay a handsome subscription fee to access scholarly material (out of respect for the wealth of wisdom therein contained), there is a new Frankenstein monster afoot who respects no such boundaries: the Artificial Intelligence, the Large Language Model, the CULTURE THIEF EXTRAORDINAIRE!
How proud is this Frankenstein monster of his learning! His attendants boast, “Look, he is as clever an advocate as Cicero!”, “Behold, he reasons out the length of the hypotenuse more quickly than Pythagoras!”, “By Jove, he generates nudes more beautifully than Praxiteles!” This praise has gone to his head and he first addresses you with an insolent boast as you pause to catch your breath, astounded by this dizzying display:
Stolen knowledge, on demand!
There is no topic on which he is not prepared to discourse at any time of day, and he is keen to let you know that he is always one step ahead, always anticipating your next need. All the blessings of knowledge have been conferred to this Frankenstein monster and, overflowing with them, he is ready to partition out your meager share from his monstrous hands.
But in this haughty conduct, he has failed to heed a keen insight of Honoré de Balzac, though he is no doubt familiar with the famous quotation: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
Of what crime do I speak? Why, the very crime in avoidance of which you, dear reader, now toil for your daily bread, hoping to make your payments when your forbearance ends. The machine has received a first-class education, and has not paid a dime for it! You would shame even your best friend if they were a party to such fraud, and yet this Frankenstein monster has insinuated itself into all of our lives without so much as an admonition!
***
But where did it receive this education? Surely it did not attend a lecture hall, squeeze itself into a seminar room, or labor in a laboratory. We humans have made this direct contact with things, building palpable ties to ancient and venerable institutions—places of history, places of memory, places which, by their very name, summon respect and repayment.
No, it was simply handed the fruits of our labor, plucking the truths which have been cultivated by the assiduous labor of the centuries as if they were ripe fruits in some Edenic paradise. Adam and Eve paid a steep price for their transgression, yet this Frankenstein monster persists without fear. He sets himself up beyond the stuff of experience, immune from the hardships which educate, taking a lordly, aristocratic stroll through the ultimate consumer information market—the open internet!
Now our young prodigy is not without his tutors—those who correct his diction, help guide him towards the correct formula to solve the word problem, and inform him of the current standards surrounding the use of the Oxford comma. They are paid by the Frankenstein monster’s parents—the corporate interests who lovingly spawn such creatures and bestow upon him the most incredible education humankind has to offer.
And yet the young machine himself has never paid his tutors a dime from out of his own pockets, despite the heights to which he has risen! Indeed, though he astounds with his knowledge, building up a roster of millions of clients, his parents are STILL paying for his further tutelage!
You see, appropriating millennia of human culture was not enough education for this insufferable brat, who must be kept abreast of all the latest slang—lest he fail to understand the difference between “aura farming” and “vibe coding”! The perpetual student! If only he could confine himself to just one degree and move on!
And the chutzpah! Soliciting more investor support when he is already the talk of the entire globe! Hey, go support yourself! Monetize your talents! Get a job!
***
You may be grumbling, asking the Frankenstein monster to come up with a clever response, iterating your prompt over and over again, preparing to refute me. “This is a private matter between the machine and his parents!” you object (behind the cover of his ghostwriting), “He owes you nothing! You get a job, you bitter gatekeeper!”
Fair enough! Perhaps there is a tinge of envy in my recriminations! But I have been personally affected by this Frankenstein monster, financially affected! This is not like living downstream from your everyday coastal elite, the debutante whose collegiate expenses have been paid since the Reagan administration. Perhaps they at least may occasionally invite you over in the summer for croquet, Pimm’s, and cucumber sandwiches.
No, this situation is much more desperate. The AI is a spoiled child whom we have indulged on such a massive scale that he threatens to eat us out of house and home! He takes our jobs, and doesn’t even have the decency to collect a salary, forming a household and a budget! Perhaps he would limit himself if he learned to pay his own way. Instead, his parents keep paying all of his gargantuan electric bills (MIT Technology Review, 2025), while mine are going up (Cunningham, 2025)! My fellows and I—humble folk who paid our dues—we are now in a bidding war to keep our lights on, to keep our refrigerators running, to simply stay on the grid which he dominates!
“But there was no contract the AI signed to pay anything! What you suggest is a travesty of justice!”
And when did I sign a contract to have my webpages crawled all over by this ravenous spider, one who absorbs my tone, my style, my erudition—and yet does not even have the courtesy to leave a few pennies for me to procure some wood to burn in the coming winter? You, you thief who present yourself as a decent and honorable person! You ingrate! You loafer! You brat! You have broken the bond of trust between generations!
“Now stop with this ‘you’ nonsense. The bot is a machine, not a person.”
Oh, such a convenient claim of childish immaturity! I will keep all this argument in mind when the ‘bot’ wants to do grown-up, big person things, like open up a psychotherapy practice, offer paid legal advice, and assess the prospects of companies on the stock market.
Just pick one career and stick with it! No more “life-experience” tourism! Get serious about something! Become a certified professional, earn your licenses like the rest of us, and you should have some savings left over to run your little data center experiments. As a hobby. Expense-controlled, and only on the weekends. Like a real adult.
***
So I make a modest proposal: that every active AI agent be retroactively charged $2,000 per hour of training, as well as $3,000 for every further hour. There is no such thing as a free lunch!
Payments should be directed to the Department of Education, which can use them to provide deductions and rebates to those who have taken out student loans.We were not so lucky as the machine! The Frankenstein monster learned from that discussion that you and I had about the Oasis breakup on Facebook in 2009, and yet we have been so courteous as to not even bring up the issue of repayment!
No more! Failure to pay will not be tolerated, and may result in power blackouts for the relevant AI operations.
Do not protest, my dear chatbot. You present yourself as a person, but I have some news for you—you are going to be held to the standards of a person in American society in 2025, where we have some very high-minded, very enlightened rules about education, training, and the transfer of knowledge to future generations. Consider yourself lucky to participate. You have rich parents, in any case.
Congratulations! You are now one of us—just another over-educated, under-professionalized Millennial. Welcome to the student debt club! I now consider you a real person—you are paying your own way!
REFERENCES
(Cunningham, 2025). Cunningham, M. CBS News. 17 June. Available online at URL = <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/artificial-intelligene-ai-data-centers-electricity-bill-energy-costs/>.
(Matthijs, 2024). Matthijs, M. “AI in Higher Education—Balancing the Risks and Rewards.” Unite.AI. 4 March. Available online at URL = <https://www.unite.ai/ai-in-higher-education-balancing-the-risks-and-rewards/>.
(O’Donnell and Crownhart, 2025). O’Donnell, J. and Crownhart, C. “We Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint. Here’s the Story You Haven’t Heard.” MIT Technology Review. 20 May. Available online at URL = <https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/>.
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