Up to 450K Michigan college students eligible for free OpenAI credits

Oh, marvellous—up to 450,000 Michigan college students are being handed $100 each in OpenAI Codex credits, because what better way to foster education than by distributing corporate freebies with all the enthusiasm of a drug dealer at a school gate? The $45 million price tag looks generous until you realise it's just venture capital's way of training a generation to rely on a proprietary coding crutch. Once those credits expire after one academic year, the habit's formed—and the price tag appears.

The state of Michigan, rather than investing in public education or open-source alternatives, is effectively acting as OpenAI's distribution channel. The governor probably posed for a shiny photo op while students are being quietly locked into an ecosystem where 'coding' means typing natural language into a black box. And let's not forget Codex itself—a tool that's great at autocompleting boilerplate but famously hallucinates like a fever dream when logic gets twisty. But hey, it's free, right?

Ah, that weasel phrase 'up to'—450,000 eligible means the actual number could be far lower, but OpenAI gets the PR boost regardless. Meanwhile, the real costs—privacy erosion, the slow death of debugging skills, and the quiet burial of open-source curiosity—aren't on any balance sheet. But cheer up: Michigan's students are now officially the lab rats in the great AI education experiment. Free credits today, full-price subscriptions tomorrow. What a deal.