A thousand Americans were given $1,000 a month for the sake of an experiment

A thousand Americans from poor families in Illinois and Texas received $1,000 a month for three years as part of a social experiment. The OpenResearch company conducted what the organizerscalled the largest study in history of the impact of a guaranteed basic income on a person's life.

OpenResearch received a $24 million grant from OpenAI and its creator Sam Altman. One of the goals of the study was to test what would happen if AI took away people’s jobs and basic income became necessary for survival.

OpenResearch transferred $1,000 to the accounts of people aged 21 to 40 from November 2020 to November 2023. The criterion for inclusion in the experiment was income for 2019, which had to be no more than three times the federal poverty line: $77,250 for a family of four per year, or $37,470 for an individual.

Researchers have published the results of the impact of unconditional income on employment, health, and consumption. Recipients of $1,000 spent an average of $310 more per month than before the experiment, meaning they saved some of the free money. However, on average, incomes without the “unconditional thousand” fell by $125 per month. People got used to working less over three years, but only by a little more than an hour a week and eight days a year, OpenResearch experts noted.

Despite detailed data, including blood samples from participants and dietary information, “we find virtually no evidence of improvement in physical health,” the study authors wrote. There was a short-term improvement in mental health, largely due to reduced stress, but the effect wore off by the end of the first year.

However, the participants in the experiment improved their diet and began to visit general practitioners and dentists more often. Basic income recipients spent about $20 more per month on health care than before November 2020. The effect will still be felt in the long term, OpenResearch assured. “The appeal of unconditional basic income lies in the freedom that such cash transfers provide: people can choose what type of consumption meets their personal priorities,” the authors of the study concluded.

They recorded interviews with nine recipients of the $1,000 monthly stipend. “The most important thing the experiment gave me was a time of peace of mind where I could figure out what I really wanted out of life,” said one participant named Dominic.

The publication of the results of the OpenResearch study is not yet complete. In particular, materials on the impact of a small guaranteed basic income on life. In addition to a thousand people who received $ 1,000 per month, there was another group of two thousand people who received $ 50 per month from 2020 to 2023.

The main sponsor of the study, OpenAI, has found itself at the center of controversy several times over its AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT. In December 2023, The New York Timesaccused OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement by training neural networks on the texts of the newspaper's journalists. In May 2024, Scarlett Johansson said that OpenAI used a voice almost identical to the actress's when creating the Sky voice assistant for the ChatGPT system.

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