“In terms of disruption… I don’t think is going to be quite as immediately ground-shaking in most areas as people think it’s going to be,” Mittelsteadt said. This, he said, is the kind of company that’s likely to be most affected by generative AI’s disruptive properties - those that aggregate rather than providing any kind of original content or service. Mittelsteadt characterized Chegg as a classically extractive middleman service, paying once for materials that it can then charge for over and over again. “The exact type of thing that I’m hoping gets disrupted or destabilized by is these corporations that engage in this rent-seeking behavior.” His response to the news was… not ambiguous. This morning I called Matthew Mittelsteadt, a tech researcher at the free-market-oriented Mercatus Center, to get his read on the situation and shed some light on what generative AI might have in store for the economy next.

So as its share price takes a beating, is the company the proverbial dead canary in a coal mine or just an unlucky outlier?

Chegg calls this “homework help.” Many educators call it “cheating.” Students apparently now call it irrelevant, as ChatGPT provides for free something close enough to the service for which Chegg currently charges $15.95 a month. Next will it kill the college admissions essay altogether? The PR flack? The local newspaper?Ĭhegg is a somewhat unique case, as a company that was the subject of intense scrutiny even before its seeming admission of defeat by ChatGPT - it allows students to post their homework online in search of answers from other people. ChatGPT has already destroyed the once-robust industry of Kenyans writing college students’ essays for them. Since ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools first captured the public’s imagination last year, there’s been rabid speculation about their potential to revolutionize the economy. Yesterday the price of shares from California-based learning company Chegg tanked by nearly half, after its CEO Dan Rosensweig said on an earnings call that he believes ChatGPT is “having an impact on our new customer growth rate.” Market-watchers on Twitter noted it’s likely the first ever publicly-traded company to acknowledge that it’s getting battered by the new technology. | Seth Wenig/AP PhotoĬhatGPT has claimed its first casualty on the stock market. A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

Snakeroot andrea robertson