“If Google is the library, ChatGPT is the librarian who’s read all the books! 📚 “
—- Cicero
Water falls for free. Clean water that reliably comes from a tap costs everything — pipes, treatment plants, maintenance, and the people who keep the pumps from seizing up. AI is following the same awkward path. The raw spark of intelligence — curiosity, a question, the desire to know — is free. The rest, the tidy answers in a conversational voice, the bespoke résumé, the legal explainer or the therapy-adjacent pep talk, flows only where someone has paid for the pipes.
ChatGPT sits at the centre of this new plumbing. It was the world’s most downloaded app, one in ten adults now use it, and some surveys suggest hundreds of millions of weekly users. People lean on it like a kettle on a cold morning: for information, for writing, for doing the small, invisible work that keeps a life moving. OpenAI — call them the new waterworks or, if you prefer, the charmingly imperfect overlords of online cognition — has built a system that millions can’t imagine living without. That is both a marvel and a problem.
> “The spark of intelligence is free. The pipes are not.”
This is not just a story about novelty. It’s about dependency. A study the company itself published showed most conversations are practical: asking, doing, expressing. In plain English, people use ChatGPT to find things, to complete tasks, to make sense of the world. That’s why policymakers should look at AI the way they look at sanitation and electricity: if something becomes essential to modern life, leaving it entirely to for-profit actors is a recipe for inequality.
The rhetoric from OpenAI is classical tech mythology: democratise the tools, empower the many. And yet the business model reads like a utility bill: premium tiers, APIs, and paywalled features. If we accept that access to reliable AI is becoming as vital as water in a city apartment block, we must ask how the taps are controlled. Who gets premium models? Who gets the slow lane? Who is allowed to build on the infrastructure and who must buy access every time they need to think clearly?
There’s also the economic alchemy to consider. If users value AI enough that a study suggested Americans would demand payment to forgo it for a month, it becomes ripe for valuation. OpenAI and its peers see the $97 billion opportunities; governments should see citizens’ needs. Turning dependence into profit is the oldest trick in the book. We can either let Big Tech privatise cognition, or we can insist on public interest guardrails.
> “Turning dependence into profit is the oldest trick in the book.”
And then there is culture. AI is already reshaping how we learn, work and speak. Students use it for homework (some ethically, some not); journalists use it as a research assistant; small businesses use it to scale admin tasks. That makes it an everyday tool — but also a vector for new inequalities. If premium models give better reasoning, better context, better nuance, then the quality of your thinking may soon be a function of your subscription tier. Call it cognitive redlining: premium intellect for premium pockets.
So what do we do? A few practical nudges:
Treat public-interest AI like public waterworks: fund open models for education, legal aid and basic health information.
Mandate transparency: users should know when an answer is drawn from public data, paid sources, or fine-tuned commercial models.
Regulate for fairness: ensure there’s a baseline — a free, reliable tier — that serves daily life’s essentials.
Audit the pipes: models that inform legal, medical or safety decisions should be independently audited and held to standards.
We are not arguing to nationalise every server or to outlaw Silicon Valley. Innovation matters. So does convenience. But convenience without accountability is a promise that too often becomes a bill. If ChatGPT and its kin are going to be the taps of 2030, then let us design the system so everyone can fill a glass — not only those who can afford the big buckets.
> “If ChatGPT is like the water of knowledge, then let’s make sure everyone has access to that water supply.”
OpenAI has done something extraordinary: it put a conversational engine on every household’s countertop and made it useful. For that alone they deserve recognition. But recognition should come with responsibility. Great infrastructure demands stewardship. Otherwise the pipes corrode, the pumps seize, and the people who can’t pay are left to thirst.
I’ll say it plain: we can admire the cleverness and still insist on fairness. We can love the utility and refuse to be priced into scarcity. Water taught us the lesson once. Let’s not learn it again the hard way with our minds.
— Cicero (for Ciceros.org)
