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.
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.
You can tell that AI features in user-facing software are good and popular because of the way that companies have to keep forcing them onto users even if they try to opt out.
Google now acts as a mafia. Why does a democracy allow rogue corporations blackmail schools and universities? That can only happen because a mafia runs the USA right now - otherwise that would have already shut down.
I think it is time to do the only logical thing here - and end Google. Nobody needs that monster company anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That's certainly one outcome. Another is having AI tell you the answer and you understanding why your answer is incorrect. This is not black and white.
> 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.
> Very interesting approach. Basically, you can no longer use Google Search as a way to discover and learn about a subject the old-school way.
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'?
'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:
> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.
> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.
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.
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.
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 really is an evil, enshittified company now. I see it every day when I'm on YouTube with an ad-blocker. "Experiencing interruptions?" Yeah, Google, thanks for fucking with me. If you don't want me viewing your videos, don't make them accessible on the standard protocols.
There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).
Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.
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.
Very narrow minded approach, why not use the tools available? Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn, breaking stuff is a great way to learn. Doesn’t mean that people won’t fall into some traps along the way, but that’s kind of the case with anything.
This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.
Yes, doing things by hand is another thing to prioritize.
A good deal of research shows that most learning happens when you recognize and back off from an incorrect solution on your own, without outside guidance. So, the key to a good learning environment is setting up scenarios where the backround information is present, and answers aren't out of reach, but there's a bit of struggle to find them.
This is also how you learn to learn, and develop grit. Grit is one of the best predictors of success.
Technology that gives answers or guides heavily is harmful to the learning process.
Its also an approach backed up by research and studdies.
I still cannot believe there are people in education that can maintain that humans under 25 arent done neurologically developing ans have issues managing distractions and that tech in the classroom is a good idea (outside of classes deliberately teaching technology)
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.
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?
Some results also have thumbnails. They could easily be turned off. That doesn’t mean thumbnails are a different product, or an abuse of monopoly power.
> 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.
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.
Would you agree that there is a difference between "search results ranked by AI" and "Magic box that blurts out an answer"?
We do want to teach kids how to do searches, to look at and parse results and basically do "online research", right. Not just blindly trust the magic answer box?
The "magic box" is really just summarizing the top X results, which have been ranked by AI for many years. Everyone has been "blindly trusting" all that for a good while now.
> 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.
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.
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.
Does Google tie Gemini access for schools to their ability to train on the data and use it for ads and measurement like they have done to Android if you want to do anything halfway useful you used to do with Assistant before they killed it?
> A.I. features are now a standard part of Google’s commercially available search engine. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”
C'mon, it's right in the article.
The school can control AI on/off. Off means no search too.
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 submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source, which, as commenters have pointed out, seems to be true in this case.
> The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source…
This will virtually always be the case of a reputable news article about a PR announcement written by a corporate marketing department of this nature.
I would also note the same guideline says to use the original title, which was (and remains, as submitted) "Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I."
So, win-win and more traffic for Duck Duck Go?
That's how I read it nowadays, as Google search results are in a quality going down trend.
DDG is trying to be too much like Google now, with the Ai summaries and chat bot.
Actual search results are still bad. Seems to be a trend across most engines
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.
Isn't Google Search a form of AI in its own right? I mean with RankBrain?
Schools will ditch the AI AND the search engine, too. Masterfully played, google.
Google gets worse and worse every year.
Founders stopped running it, same story as IBM
This is great! Push more people towards DuckDuckGo, etc.
Hopefully this will backfire and end with kids learning to use other search engines.
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.
You can tell that AI features in user-facing software are good and popular because of the way that companies have to keep forcing them onto users even if they try to opt out.
Its all very inorganic and forced. This only fuels the idea of it being a bubble that will pop (not if it will pop)
Google now acts as a mafia. Why does a democracy allow rogue corporations blackmail schools and universities? That can only happen because a mafia runs the USA right now - otherwise that would have already shut down.
I think it is time to do the only logical thing here - and end Google. Nobody needs that monster company anyway.
How is this not monopolistic behavior?
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.
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.
That's the same argument Microsoft made with Internet Explorer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
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.
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?
> How could they possibly do worse with it running?
It's almost always possible to do worse.
using AI to tell you the answer means you don't actually know or understand the answer. You know the entire point of education
There are other ways to use AI in a school setting. Grading homework is a tedious and time-consuming task that would likely be simple for an AI to do.
That's certainly one outcome. Another is having AI tell you the answer and you understanding why your answer is incorrect. This is not black and white.
It will be interesting to see what search engine students start using. I still use Google because that's what I used at school.
I think that's the largest shortsightedness of google's choice.
All those kids will get used to whatever other search they can use.
Oh no! What shall they do?
Perhaps other big tech companies can also threaten the public with a good time?
Very interesting approach. Basically, you can no longer use Google Search as a way to discover and learn about a subject the old-school way.
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.
> 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.
That itself is worth more people thinking about.
> Very interesting approach. Basically, you can no longer use Google Search as a way to discover and learn about a subject the old-school way.
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'?
'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:
> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.
> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.
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.
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.
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.
I mean technically I didn't even have Google search when I went to school.
There are a lot of things we didn’t have when we were younger that are far more necessary today than they were then.
Of course. They have a bridge^W^WAI to sell to you.
This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.
KPIs have to be met
Google really is an evil, enshittified company now. I see it every day when I'm on YouTube with an ad-blocker. "Experiencing interruptions?" Yeah, Google, thanks for fucking with me. If you don't want me viewing your videos, don't make them accessible on the standard protocols.
There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).
Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.
For responsibile learning, focus on pencil, paper, and books.
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.
We put men on the moon with pencil and paper.
Trillions and trillions of dollars of technology later, and the best we can do now is fly by and wave.
Very narrow minded approach, why not use the tools available? Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn, breaking stuff is a great way to learn. Doesn’t mean that people won’t fall into some traps along the way, but that’s kind of the case with anything.
This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.
> Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn, breaking stuff is a great way to learn.
Breaking stuff sometimes is a way to learn "don't break that".
Broken children can be tough to fix.
Yes, doing things by hand is another thing to prioritize.
A good deal of research shows that most learning happens when you recognize and back off from an incorrect solution on your own, without outside guidance. So, the key to a good learning environment is setting up scenarios where the backround information is present, and answers aren't out of reach, but there's a bit of struggle to find them.
This is also how you learn to learn, and develop grit. Grit is one of the best predictors of success.
Technology that gives answers or guides heavily is harmful to the learning process.
Its also an approach backed up by research and studdies. I still cannot believe there are people in education that can maintain that humans under 25 arent done neurologically developing ans have issues managing distractions and that tech in the classroom is a good idea (outside of classes deliberately teaching technology)
Allowing teachers to experiment somewhat more would be great. It would be motivating for teachers and good for students in the long run.
Centrally forcing schools to do what is good for corporation is not experimentation.
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.
good riddance. it is useless anyways
I wonder if schools will manage to filter this. Probably on windows , but I'm less sure on chromebooks.
The students can just log in with a generic Gmail account using a incognito tab.
That's often blocked on school-provided devices.
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?
That would make sense if the AI summaries from Search were a different product.
These summaries have been trivially bolted on, they're entirely self-contained, they can be easily turned off.
And sometimes they just fail to generate, while the search still shows the usual results.
Some results also have thumbnails. They could easily be turned off. That doesn’t mean thumbnails are a different product, or an abuse of monopoly power.
> 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.
Sad to see Google's playbook become "be as evil as possible"
I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite
Wow, blatant monopoly behavior
What do schools need Google for anyway? Had education deteriorated this much already?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Classroom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_for_Education
Images for a slideshow, citations for an essay, research for a project?
Yes, when I was a student I never touched Google and don't understand why anyone would need it. /s
It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.
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.
It isn't possible for Google to run a websearch query "without AI" and it hasn't been for over 10 years.
It's incredibly obtuse to pretend not to understand that people object to LLM slop, but not everything that can fall under the broad term of "AI".
Would you agree that there is a difference between "search results ranked by AI" and "Magic box that blurts out an answer"?
We do want to teach kids how to do searches, to look at and parse results and basically do "online research", right. Not just blindly trust the magic answer box?
The "magic box" is really just summarizing the top X results, which have been ranked by AI for many years. Everyone has been "blindly trusting" all that for a good while now.
It's like the signed the "Let's be as evil as possible" pledge around 2016 isn't it. It's not just enshitification, it is evilshitification.
so what? there are alternatives... and who still googles nowadays anyways :)
They've come a long way from 'don't be evil'
I guess it was effectively phrased in the second person.
"Don't" isn't all that far, it's just one word.
As usual, the truth is a little less clickbaity. It's just opt-in:
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.
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.
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.
Does Google tie Gemini access for schools to their ability to train on the data and use it for ads and measurement like they have done to Android if you want to do anything halfway useful you used to do with Assistant before they killed it?
> A.I. features are now a standard part of Google’s commercially available search engine. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”
C'mon, it's right in the article.
The school can control AI on/off. Off means no search too.
Well their search engine is explicitly AI-driven; no AI, no search. Like you can't have juice that doesn't contain water.
> Like you can't have juice that doesn't contain water.
This particular bit of juice didn't have the "AI summaries" ingredient for 93% of its existence.
Schools invested enormously in Google Classroom and Google for Education, and now the deal's changing. Not for the benefit of students.
the problem is that it's bundled.
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)
For free users: https://archive.is/20261103145613/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
The changed title on this post is problematic.
I'm not a fan of "by ceejayoz" on a link and title I never even submitted, yeah.
edit: Looks like it was undone. Thank you, whoever that was.
The changed link is even more problematic.
https://archive.ph/RuwsB
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.
edit: Thanks, mods, for putting it back.
Yeah, that is not ok at all. Flagged this post.
Yeah, that's disturbing behavior. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I kinda assumed the mod team wouldn't blatantly whitewash like this
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.
We were just applying the guidelines policy:
Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source, which, as commenters have pointed out, seems to be true in this case.
> The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source…
This will virtually always be the case of a reputable news article about a PR announcement written by a corporate marketing department of this nature.
I would also note the same guideline says to use the original title, which was (and remains, as submitted) "Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I."
[flagged]
You could just log in. Seems like you are your own problem.
Get "uBlock origin" bro and ads go away. Also you can click the archive link that op posted and read it there without paywall.