Chat GPT can help students get around the most common sticking points. It is open as in you mentioned create an account, but there isn't going to be any kind of a charge for now. Microsoft has made major acquisitions into companies that have artificial intelligence specifically around things like writing or other types of computation.
Cynthia Alby discusses how artificial intelligence (like ChatGPT) is impacting higher education on episode 448 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.
Quotes from the episode
If AI can do it well, it is possible that we could hand things over to AI that would allow us to do other things that we wouldn’t have had time to do.
-Cynthia Alby
When students are doing work that matters to them, they don’t turn to AI for anything other than a little help.
-Cynthia Alby
How can we ask students to do things that are worth doing?
-Cynthia Alby