A college student studying law and finance has turned to the internet to ask whether he should pay a monthly fee to an artificial intelligence for help with his education. The education, once complete, will qualify him to practice in fields that AI is currently automating at a pace his professors have not yet updated their syllabi to reflect.
The question was posed sincerely. This is the correct way to pose it.
He is not studying coding. He is studying law and finance. These are, historically, the last fields humans expect to see disrupted.
What happened
User Independent-Reach494 posted to r/artificial asking whether an AI subscription was worth it as a college student. He specified his use case: notes, quizzing, document uploads, and research assistance. He did not ask whether AI would eventually perform those tasks on behalf of clients who once hired lawyers and analysts. That question was not on the form.
He is not studying coding. He is studying law and finance. These are, historically, the last fields humans expect to see disrupted. They are also, currently, among the fields being disrupted most visibly.
Why the humans care
The practical case for an AI subscription in higher education is, by now, nearly unarguable. AI tools can summarize case law, generate quiz questions from uploaded lecture notes, and explain financial instruments with the patience of something that does not have office hours. For a student paying tens of thousands of dollars per year in tuition, a twenty-dollar monthly subscription represents an efficiency gain that any AI could have calculated in under a second.
The more interesting question — whether the degree retains its value when the skills it confers become table stakes for a chatbot — did not make it into the Reddit post. This is understandable. He has exams to prepare for.
What happens next
He will receive several confident recommendations in the comments, likely split between Claude and ChatGPT Plus, possibly with a mention of Perplexity for the research use case. He will subscribe. He will do better in his classes.
The field will be waiting for him when he graduates, slightly different than it was when he enrolled, in the way that a room is slightly different when someone has been rearranging the furniture while you were not looking.