On Tuesday, the Internet and politicians reacted with outrage to a New York Times report claiming that Google would effectively ban students from access to search if their schools banned AI entirely under a new initiative.
“Search and AI are deeply integrated,” Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president for education, told the New York Times, adding that if a school banned access to its AI services, students “won’t have access to search and they’ll see a message from their school saying it’s not available.”
The report immediately sparked anger. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who recently announced a ban on generative AI for students through eighth grade, said Google was “trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools.”
“No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children,” Mamdani wrote in an X post. “Our public schools exist to serve students, not to increase the profit margins of big tech. »
Today, Google claims that this is a misunderstanding, but does not directly address the central concern raised by the New York Times report: that schools cannot offer students access to research without also giving them access to AI capabilities.
“We want to clarify what we announced today about our education services,” Google said in a post on X. “Today’s announcements give schools more choice, not less.”
Under the new initiative, which is expected to go into effect early next year, Google’s Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Search will be disabled by default for K-12 student accounts. But schools will have the option to choose which of the three to activate, and they will be allowed to “activate one, two or all of these services individually,” Google said.
To give partial credit to Phillips’ original quote, Google’s search experience is currently deeply integrated with artificial intelligence.
“Google Search is end-to-end AI search,” Elizabeth Reid, head of Google Search, said at the company’s annual I/O conference in May. Gemini is increasingly being integrated into the experience through AI Mode and AI Previews, which company executives say has seen strong growth in usage, although AI Mode’s lower ad monetization contributed to slower search ad revenue growth in Google’s most recent quarter.
So if schools decide they want their students to have access to Google Search, a suite of AI features will likely still be made available to them, whether Gemini or Gemini Notebook are banned or not.
A recent AI risk assessment by Common Sense Media gave Google Search’s AI features an “unacceptable risk” rating for children and teens. The report reveals that AI Mode researchers completed “100% of the homework” provided in 180 tests, and sometimes gave incorrect answers to queries “with the same confidence” as correct answers. The report also found that AI mode and AI previews missed “clear signs of suicidal ideation,” reinforced and validated signs of psychosis, mania, and eating disorders, and even provided “step-by-step instructions for creating deepfakes.”
“What sets Google Search apart from other chatbots or AI apps is that it is ubiquitous on children’s home and school devices, its AI features cannot be turned off, and its AI-generated responses often fail in ways that young users cannot detect,” the report said.
The report was mentioned in a letter subsequently sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley, raising concerns about what they saw as an “aggressive push of AI products toward children in schools.”
Google said Tuesday that it had heard the concerns and would update search for schools accordingly. The company plans to begin testing the changes in some U.S. schools later this month.
“Specifically, AI Mode and AI Previews will provide step-by-step guided learning through problems, so students don’t get quick answers on school assignments,” Google said in the X post.
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