I just realised I hate paywalls so much that I always close nytimes rather than logging in (I have a subscription). This one was particularly gross, the paywall blocked all of the article but left a banner ad at the top full of women posing in underwear. It's like the old internet is back
> If a school has banned A.I., he [Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google] added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”
So scummy! Make it sound like the school's decision, rather than Google's.
That's what every Big Tech company has done when threatened with loss of access to their children: weaponize the children themselves with poor gaslighting to fight the adults so Big Tech gets its way.
Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.
When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.
> We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach. After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.
From the article, Google AI is deeply integrated with Google Search. So the article is correct - turning off one turns off the other.
From a privacy perspective, having all of this off by default is sensible. But only offering a basic product like Search if you opt into AI (when search as a capability does not need AI to function) - is newsworthy.
> when search as a capability does not need AI to function
That means a far less capable search engine. Note that Google search has been AI-powered since before AI became a thing; it's now just more advanced, and particularly, explicitly publicized.
Google blog says search will be off by default, alongside Gemini stuff.
And NYT says they would only be able to turn search on if they enable all of the Gemini stuff. That is not mentioned explicitly on google's blog. So not _that_ clickbaity?
> … and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.
So yeah the blog post says Google Search itself will be entirely off until being turned on. There’s nothing in this blog post to indicate whether Google Search can be turned on without also turning on Gemini. Although I hate the NYT, the NYT is quoting someone from Google saying there won’t be separate controls for Gemini and Google Search.
Their search engine is now integrated with Ai. So either google would need to block the search engine or the school if they don't want Ai. Take your pick.
A lot of these schools use tablets though. The kids probably use their phones so more likely to be google. Higher grades though use laptops I think so more likely Microsoft then. So far internet explorer is not integrated with Ai but microsoft copilot though is 100% ai and can be used for search.
Obviously they have at least a back-end search service that isn't tangled up with an LLM. When Gemini says "Searching the web..." it isn't chatbots all the way down. Google just needs to make a human UI for the same search Gemini uses.
Yeah, I read this and immediately thought “tying arrangement.” But they’re not CHARGING separately for search and AI, so I doubt a tying theory would hold up in court.
This comes off as comically evil. Disabling the AI summaries in search results is trivial, so them refusing to do so and blocking search entirely feels like a blatant attempt at coercion. Isn't it an abuse of monopoly power?
I don't understand why you would need to use it at school, in a classroom with a teacher present. It's not like Google does anything to student's personal computers at home or the one in the public library.
As an example, when I was at school, I would use the library in the building to do research for my papers. It would be odd for a major search engine to just not be available at my school, I feel. I would have to wait for the weekend to go home and be on a network that's not the schools to then use that search engine? Very inconvenient.
I really don't like that my original submission "Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I." from the New York Times got replaced with "Designing responsible AI for learning" PR slop from Google Corporate that doesn't even disclose this limitation.
If the mods are gonna Orwell this, at least take my name off it.
They are constantly tipping the scales here, and if you say so everyone will show up and claim they're the best mod team on the planet and totally fair and it's outrageous that you want to see accountability for mod actions via some sort of mod log and the mods will say that a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening and they'll also use rules like a cudgel and claim a technical reading of some rule will absolve them. Then again, we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales.
Please don't post ranting accusations like this. We're accountable to this community every single day, as this case demonstrates. Any time we do anything that seems even a little bit suspect to a significant segment of the audience, we hear about it very quickly.
> a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening
I don't know of any time we've said anything like that. We've said many times that we wouldn't publish a moderation log because it's well-established that when you do that kind of thing, the discussion gets side-tracked into meta-discussion about moderation actions rather than the primary topic, and what we want most for HN is for the discussions we have here to be the highest-quality discussions about the topic. There are still plenty of ways for people to see what we're doing and hold us to account if we get things wrong.
> we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales
HN is only any use to our bosses if we continue to be the place where the best (i.e., "smartest") hackers come to have the highest-quality discussions about the most important topics, and the best/smartest hackers tend to have the best bullshit detectors. But even if we thought we should deprioritize that consideration and instead "tip the scales" in aid of the interests of our parent organization, YC has zero interest in protecting the reputation or commercial interests of the megacorps, which it demonstrates through its actions continually.
Poor Orwell; the man spent his life fighting totalitarian ideals to the point he got shot for his troubles and was lucky to live, and now we use his name to describe the very things he opposed.
This is great! Google search has been declining in usefulness so much, that it shouldn't be used by students anyway. And then there's the shitty ai summaries, which students definitely shouldn't have to worry about whether or not it's accurate.
I love old school research using books, however the advantages of connected information cannot be understated.
We could do much better with access to online libraries (which don't exist, apart from the very limited sample from these books accessible using Wikipedia).
Current (blogs and articles and forums) online resources provide information at a rate book search just can't provide.
Jesus, it has absolutely nothing to do with not having the technological capacity to go back and land on the moon, and everything to do with political and social will. We have rockets doing gymnastics in the sky and landing doing back-flips, you really think we've regressed because "we're not doing pen and paper"?
A big part of this era is a shift to de-anonymizing all search, research, etc. That should be seen as its own problem separate from one's feelings about AI.
Google thinks forcing schools to use AI to fuel search will give them great cash. You have far too kind a view on what Google hopes AI will do to schools and not nearly a cynical economic one.
Google thinks that will be more profitable if they force schools to use AI. They do not think "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense, they think "no AI in schools" is bad for their bottom line, somehow.
that is an absolutely repugnant take from anyone at Google (I will not attribute this to a legal entity that cannot think, a human being made this call and is accountable for it). They are not educators and should have absolutely zero say in how schools do things.
They don't, they do however have say on how they develop their own products, and they want to stuff search full of AI. At least they let schools opt out of it easily.
"You don't have to use AI, but if not you can't stay here".
> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.
For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.
What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.
Studies need to be done on how very terrible, bottom 5% of schools perform with all the extra AI help Google can enable. How could they possibly do worse with it running?
You still have to double check the Agent's grading as they still make frequent minor mistakes, that while they don't really impact coding as much or can be caught with tests, that is not the case here.
The actual question to ask is if the agent makes more mistakes than a human being. Grading homework involves reading over similar/identical answers to the same questions over and over, and it is easy for human beings to make mistakes while do that.
(That is basically the argument for OCR in the postal system -- it does make mistakes but it makes fewer mistakes than human beings.)
> The AI crew's fantasy is that students sitting in front a screen will be motivated because A) the adaptive technology will hit them with exactly the right material for the student and B) shiny! Arnett explains that any dreams of AI-aided motivation are doomed to failure.
> Arnett's explanation is not exactly where I expected we were headed. Human respect is scarce, he argues, because humans only have so much time and attention to parcel out, and so it's valuable. AI has infinite attention resources, can be programed to be always there and always supportive. Arnett argues that makes its feedback worthless in terms of status and respect. ...
> But I think much of what he says here is valuable and valid-- that AI faces a major hurdle in classrooms because it offers no social relationship component, little opportunity to provide students with status or respect. Will folks come up with ways to use AI tools that have those dimensions? No doubt. But the heart of Arnett's argument is an explanation of one more reason that sitting a student in front of an AI-run screen is not a viable future for education.
is there a way to use it that prevents "tell me the answer", if not that is what enough students will gravitate towards that it will be harmful to society at large. If there is an agent that only works as an infinitely patient tutor, that will under no circumstance do the work for you, then sure. Just have expereience educators dictate the way the agent works and is used, not some marketing dweeb or MBAsshole.
Some of the worst performance schools are cyber charter schools, which often promote the idea that they use AI as a personal tutor.
If they could get better results with off-the-shelf tools, I'm pretty sure they would.
(Not 100% sure. Some non-profit charters pay a for-profit management company, which suggests commercial software, where the charter, management company, and software provider are all owned by the same person. They may prefer to make more money than improve student grades.)
I've heard anecdotal stories from MS-365 users that say it feels handicapped without Copilot. One govt worker said they noticed a marked change in word spell-checking after they had to block all AI on their systems.
The economic elite really want to dumb children down at the same time of juicing their AI numbers by bundling LLMs and searches even when they don't need to be.
311 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadSo scummy! Make it sound like the school's decision, rather than Google's.
Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.
When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/educatio...
> We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach. After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.
you either get search + all the ai stuff, or you get none of it. you can't just opt-in to search alone.
(in other words, title is accurate. block ai = no search)
From a privacy perspective, having all of this off by default is sensible. But only offering a basic product like Search if you opt into AI (when search as a capability does not need AI to function) - is newsworthy.
That means a far less capable search engine. Note that Google search has been AI-powered since before AI became a thing; it's now just more advanced, and particularly, explicitly publicized.
And NYT says they would only be able to turn search on if they enable all of the Gemini stuff. That is not mentioned explicitly on google's blog. So not _that_ clickbaity?
So yeah the blog post says Google Search itself will be entirely off until being turned on. There’s nothing in this blog post to indicate whether Google Search can be turned on without also turning on Gemini. Although I hate the NYT, the NYT is quoting someone from Google saying there won’t be separate controls for Gemini and Google Search.
Search is off; if you want it back on, you get Gemini summaries with it. you can't get Search _without_ Gemini
Scummy wording makes it looks like google is giving more control, but it's really the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I added a custom search engine entry to firefox that does this, made it the default, and haven't seen an AI summary from Google since I did that.
Google has a severe problem with consent.
Hiding one div is 90% of the solution.
It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.
Maybe even like some kind of aggregator that allows you to combine several other search engines' results.
That'd be really cool if that exi...oh, wait...
If the mods are gonna Orwell this, at least take my name off it.
> a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening
I don't know of any time we've said anything like that. We've said many times that we wouldn't publish a moderation log because it's well-established that when you do that kind of thing, the discussion gets side-tracked into meta-discussion about moderation actions rather than the primary topic, and what we want most for HN is for the discussions we have here to be the highest-quality discussions about the topic. There are still plenty of ways for people to see what we're doing and hold us to account if we get things wrong.
> we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales
HN is only any use to our bosses if we continue to be the place where the best (i.e., "smartest") hackers come to have the highest-quality discussions about the most important topics, and the best/smartest hackers tend to have the best bullshit detectors. But even if we thought we should deprioritize that consideration and instead "tip the scales" in aid of the interests of our parent organization, YC has zero interest in protecting the reputation or commercial interests of the megacorps, which it demonstrates through its actions continually.
We could do much better with access to online libraries (which don't exist, apart from the very limited sample from these books accessible using Wikipedia).
Current (blogs and articles and forums) online resources provide information at a rate book search just can't provide.
Trillions and trillions of dollars of technology later, and the best we can do now is fly by and wave.
There are many, but all short of the potential for knowledge and learning:
Internet Archive Lending Library, Hathi Trust, Libby / Overdrive, U. of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
There are also the shadow libraries, of course.
I optimize for finding the answer to a given question, without knowing beforehand if it will be found online or in an research article or in a book.
I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.
If by "interesting" you mean "abusive and coercive."
> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
Explain that more please: whose talk is "nonsense"? Google's? Parents'? Schools'?
"You don't have to use AI, but if not you can't stay here".
More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.
For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.
What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.
That itself is worth more people thinking about.
(That is basically the argument for OCR in the postal system -- it does make mistakes but it makes fewer mistakes than human beings.)
> The AI crew's fantasy is that students sitting in front a screen will be motivated because A) the adaptive technology will hit them with exactly the right material for the student and B) shiny! Arnett explains that any dreams of AI-aided motivation are doomed to failure.
> Arnett's explanation is not exactly where I expected we were headed. Human respect is scarce, he argues, because humans only have so much time and attention to parcel out, and so it's valuable. AI has infinite attention resources, can be programed to be always there and always supportive. Arnett argues that makes its feedback worthless in terms of status and respect. ...
> But I think much of what he says here is valuable and valid-- that AI faces a major hurdle in classrooms because it offers no social relationship component, little opportunity to provide students with status or respect. Will folks come up with ways to use AI tools that have those dimensions? No doubt. But the heart of Arnett's argument is an explanation of one more reason that sitting a student in front of an AI-run screen is not a viable future for education.
If they could get better results with off-the-shelf tools, I'm pretty sure they would.
(Not 100% sure. Some non-profit charters pay a for-profit management company, which suggests commercial software, where the charter, management company, and software provider are all owned by the same person. They may prefer to make more money than improve student grades.)