Are Indian youth becoming lab rats to train big AI models?

Overnight, the fanciest AI models that once sat behind paywalls are being handed out to millions of people in India for free.

It feels like a digital coronation. This week, ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, announced its premium Go tier is now free for an entire year to all of India. It’s a generous gift, a digital key to a powerful kingdom.

This gift doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It lands just after Perplexity AI offered its own Pro version for free through a partnership with Airtel. And not to be outdone, Google has teamed up with Jio to offer its advanced AI Pro plan free for 18 months, specifically targeting the 18-25 year old demographic first.

The giants of Silicon Valley are lining up at our digital doorstep, bearing gifts worth thousands of rupees. The message is clear: India, you are the chosen one.

But it does make you stop and ask, doesn’t it? Why us? Why all at once? And why… free?

The Generous Offer

The official line is one of empowerment and market access. We are, after all, the world’s largest population and its fastest-growing digital market. We are a nation of 1.4 billion people, with a sea of young, ambitious, tech-savvy minds who are already adopting AI faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

These companies say they want to democratize access. They want to empower the Indian student, the developer, the small business owner. They see a nation poised to build the future, and they are generously providing the tools to do so.

It’s a compelling story. It’s also, almost certainly, not the whole story.

Because when the most valuable companies in the world all decide to give away their most valuable products for free to the same 1.4 billion people at the same time, it’s not just generosity. It’s a strategy.

The old Silicon Valley adage was, If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Your data was being sold to advertisers.

This is something new. This isn’t just about our data. It’s about our intellect.

In this new arrangement, are we the product? Or are we the unpaid workforce?

The Real Price: A Billion Trainers

Ask yourself: what does the company get when you test a new feature, upload a file for analysis, or rely on an AI for homework, code, or creative work? Beyond immediate usage metrics, every conversation is a training signal. User corrections, edge-case queries, slang, regional languages, and cultural references all help refine the models. Large-scale, unpaid human interaction is arguably the richest ingredient these firms need. The question then isn’t whether they value our input – of course they do – it’s whether we understand just how much of our free labor we are contributing in exchange for convenience.

Think about what an AI like ChatGPT or Gemini actually is. It’s not a static encyclopedia. It’s a learning system. And like any student, it learns through practice, conversation, and – most importantly – correction.

What does this student need to graduate from being a clever American assistant to a truly global intelligence? It needs to understand the world. And India is a classroom unlike any other.

We are not just a market. We are a dataset.

A dataset of 1.4 billion people who don’t just speak English. We speak Hinglish. We speak Thanglish, Kanglish, and Bonglish. We code-switch in the middle of a sentence, blending Hindi grammar with English vocabulary. We ask questions with a unique cultural context that a model trained on American Reddit forums could never understand.

The Digital Treadmill

They aren’t just giving us free access. They are giving it to the most active, most demanding, and most creative digital population on the planet. They are targeting the young, the developers, the knowledge workers who will push these tools to their absolute limits.

Is this empowerment, or is it the world’s largest, most sophisticated R&D experiment?

Are we the valued customer at the grand opening? Or are we the lab rats, running through a digital maze while the scientists on the other side of the glass take notes?

The cheese is a free premium subscription. The maze is the infinite canvas of our daily work, our school projects, and our personal curiosities. And the notes are the terabytes of training data we provide, making their product smarter, more capable, and ultimately, more valuable.

This isn’t a secret. The search results for why India are full of corporate buzzwords that mean exactly this: we are the proving ground, the testing ground for diverse data and anomaly detection. They need us to make their AI work globally.

The Question We Must Ask

• First, treat free as an invitation to look closer: who owns the model, where is data processed, and what rights does the service reserve over your inputs.
• Second, be deliberate about what you feed to these services – sensitive personal information, client data, and proprietary work belong in guarded vaults, not casual prompts.
• Third, push for transparency: if corporate playbooks rely on mass user participation to improve models, then companies should be required to disclose how user data is used, anonymized, and retained, and to offer real controls that are easy for ordinary people to use.

As we all rush to claim our free year of AI-powered brilliance, we must do so with our eyes wide open. We are not just users. We are a resource. We are the trainers. We are the labor.

The gift has been given. The golden handshake is offered. The question we must now ask ourselves is not What can I do with this?

The real question is: What are they doing with me?