We’re excited to share that the CSU Chancellor’s Office is providing a campus-wide license for ChatGPT EDU for all 23 CSU campuses! This means that all eligible students, faculty, and staff at Cal Poly Humboldt will have access to ChatGPT through our institutional account—offering advanced AI capabilities in a secure and private educational environment.

Unlike public versions of ChatGPT, data within our campus workspace will not be used to train internal or external AI models, ensuring enhanced privacy and protection.

The license will be free for all eligible campus users and should be accessible by the end of April. Stay tuned for more updates as we move closer to launching this new resource. OpenAI will be providing in-person training on ChatGPT in the near future.

Why ChatGPT EDU? 

Most students are already using Generative AI in one form or another (there are already more than 3,000 people signed up for free ChatGPT accounts with their @humboldt.edu email addresses), but there is a growing gap in access to this technology based on financial inequality and many students cannot afford the more powerful paid versions. With that in mind, the CSU Chancellor’s Office strives to equip students, faculty, and staff with equitable access to safe, secure, and effective tools for learning and academic success.

Additionally, this campus-wide license for ChatGPT will provide:

• Free access to OpenAI’s most sophisticated models (normally $20/month or more)
• Significantly higher message limits than the free version of ChatGPT
• Advanced capabilities such as data analytics, web site analysis, text composition, and document summarization
• The ability to build GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT, and share them within university workspaces
• Improved language capabilities with over 50 languages supported

Ethical and Other Concerns About Generative AI

Generative AI tools are an exciting emerging technology, however the use of these tools is complicated by a number of valid ethical and functional concerns surrounding them.  

Some of these concerns include:

• Resource Usage: Generative AI requires significant energy, water, and computing resources. OpenAI’s primary cloud partner Microsoft has committed to being carbon negative by 2030, using 100% renewable energy by the end of 2025, and achieving water positivity, zero waste, and net-zero deforestation by 2030.  We encourage thoughtful, ethical, and resource-conscious use of these tools.
• Bias: The CSU acknowledges the very legitimate concerns about bias and discriminatory content being generated by AI tools. While the GPT-4o models are trained with safeguards to prevent harmful or prejudiced outputs, AI is not infallible and may still reflect biases present in the data it was trained on. To ensure responsible use, we encourage all students, faculty, and staff to critically evaluate AI-generated content.
• Financial: As mentioned above, the funding for ChatGPT is being provided by the Chancellor’s Office and Cal Poly Humboldt is not incurring any direct costs for the service.
• Inaccuracies: ChatGPT and other generative AI tools will occasionally provide incorrect information (sometimes called “hallucinations”) 

For more information about AI tools in general, please see:

• The CTL’s AI website CTL AI Website
• ITS’s AI website at ITS AI Website
• The Library’s Slice of AI & Pie Website for information on upcoming AI-related events

As always, if you have any questions you can contact the Help Desk at (707) 826-4357 or send an email to help@humboldt.edu

Information Technology Services