At the start of November, Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager for education, said K-12 schools will soon have to accept the company's AI services...
Am I the only person who doesn’t understand these news stories at all?
Both Google’s search and its AI services are (as far as I can tell) just websites you can access through a web browser. What exactly were schools planning to do? Block school computers from accessing the domain gemini.google.com? How can Google prevent them from blocking that, but allowing other subdomains of google.com?!
Am I just completely failing to understand what is going on here, on a technical level?
First, these are (almost definitely, but not explicitly said in the article) districts paying for GAFE (Google Apps For Education), so they’re paying customers using enterprise-like systems to manage their users, with policies to restrict access to certain types of content (age-restricted content on YouTube, porn, games, etc.), embedding Google “stuff” in various places, automatic account creation, etc.
Second, this is not just about generative AI, it’s also about AI summaries at the top of search results, which is actively harmful to students. (Everyone, really, but especially students whose brains are still rapidly developing). Students are just learning about how to find information, and have limited bandwidth for gauging the trustworthiness of sources, so handing them an (often incorrect or misleading) AI summary is, like, a really bad idea. (Not even getting into it suggesting actively harmful things…)
And at least one district said, in effect “turn off AI summaries or we switch search providers”, while others are working on building systems to block/hide the AI summaries from students.
Am I the only person who doesn’t understand these news stories at all?
Both Google’s search and its AI services are (as far as I can tell) just websites you can access through a web browser. What exactly were schools planning to do? Block school computers from accessing the domain gemini.google.com? How can Google prevent them from blocking that, but allowing other subdomains of google.com?!
Am I just completely failing to understand what is going on here, on a technical level?
Yes, you are. On two counts.
First, these are (almost definitely, but not explicitly said in the article) districts paying for GAFE (Google Apps For Education), so they’re paying customers using enterprise-like systems to manage their users, with policies to restrict access to certain types of content (age-restricted content on YouTube, porn, games, etc.), embedding Google “stuff” in various places, automatic account creation, etc.
Second, this is not just about generative AI, it’s also about AI summaries at the top of search results, which is actively harmful to students. (Everyone, really, but especially students whose brains are still rapidly developing). Students are just learning about how to find information, and have limited bandwidth for gauging the trustworthiness of sources, so handing them an (often incorrect or misleading) AI summary is, like, a really bad idea. (Not even getting into it suggesting actively harmful things…)
And at least one district said, in effect “turn off AI summaries or we switch search providers”, while others are working on building systems to block/hide the AI summaries from students.
Ah, ok, that makes a bit more sense, thanks.