The new regulation has sparked fierce controversy: if schools want to turn off the AI functionality, Google Search will be taken offline synchronously.

Google recently rolled out a new rule: it will promote a new set of features to schools, allowing school authorities to restrict students' use of AI tools.

But there is an unavoidable pitfall here. If schools turn off AI entirely, Google Search will become unavailable as well.

If this policy is fully implemented, the impact will be far-reaching.

Google is arguably the world's leading edtech company. Its Chromebook laptops alone are used by tens of millions of students, and some children have even started using them for classes back in primary school.

It can be said that how AI is handled is directly related to the daily learning methods of countless children.

In fact, public opinion has been shifting constantly lately.

More and more communities are calling for proper management of screen time and AI tools in schools.

People are worried that children's current heavy reliance on AI may affect their learning, hinder their growth, and even bring potential safety risks.

These anxieties are not unfounded.

This school year, several large school districts including the public school systems of New York City and Los Angeles have already banned generative AI tools. Some districts ban most of such tools, while others impose a full ban on all students.

Now Google has finally taken action.

Google announced on Tuesday that for K-12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) student accounts, all products with AI features such as the Gemini assistant and Google Search will be turned off by default, unless school administrators manually enable them.

This move directly reverses Google's practice back in August.

Back in August, Google had just set Gemini to be enabled by default in Google Classroom, and now this change feels like a slap in the face of its own previous move.

But the most confusing point for schools is this: You want to turn off AI completely? Fine, then you can't use Google Search either.

Google's official statement says this move is made in response to repeated calls from teachers and policymakers for schools to have more control over AI tools.

That sounds reasonable. But in practice, schools are faced with a dilemma: either allow students to use AI, or lose access to search entirely.

Chris Phillips, Vice President of Google for Education, told The New York Times that Google Search and AI features are now deeply integrated. If schools fully disable AI, they will not be able to use Google Search.

When students open the search page, they will see a prompt saying this feature is unavailable.

To be fair, Google has fully integrated AI into its search service over the past few years.

An "AI Overview" section is added at the very top of the search results page, which directly summarizes the answers for users. The search box has also been made larger, specially designed for longer queries.

It is almost impossible to go back to a search page without AI.

The blog post Google published on Tuesday did not clearly explain how this set of controls specifically works, nor did it specify exactly what students will see if they accidentally click on Google Search in schools that have disabled AI.

Phillips said in the post that Google will share more details with schools several months before the official launch, so that they have enough time to prepare for a smooth transition.

This policy adjustment is meant to give schools "more choices, not fewer". The announcement also states that schools can control Gemini, Gemini Notes and Google Search separately.

But the subtext of the announcement still points to the same fact: Google Search cannot be used independently of AI. The original text writes that the AI mode and AI Overview will provide step-by-step guided learning, so that students will not get the direct answers to their homework.

This policy adjustment is part of a series of updates to Google's education-focused AI tools, with one core idea: AI should guide students to think through problems step by step, instead of just handing them a final answer.

Under Google's new guided learning concept, if the system detects that students are using search to do their homework, it will guide them to deduce and think through the problem step by step, instead of giving them the final answer directly.

Other AI companies are also pushing in this direction.

All of them share the same calculation: they need to convince teachers and parents that AI is a useful learning tool, and that learning to use AI early at school will make children more competitive in the workplace in the future.

OpenAI launched the youth version of ChatGPT back in August. Apart from safety controls, the service focuses heavily on learning: parents and teenagers can turn on the learning mode, and work through problems step by step.

Many other tech companies are also funding AI training for teachers to win over this key group of stakeholders.

However, not everyone buys into this. Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York who just announced the ban on AI in New York public schools this year, directly criticized Google for trying to force AI into schools after seeing this new move from the company.

This game over AI entering campuses is estimated to have just begun.

On one side, parents and teachers worry that children will be spoiled by AI; on the other side, tech companies are sparing no effort to prove that AI is a magic learning tool.

Google's new policy looks like a concession, but in essence it turns the choice into a single-choice question. In the next few months, it remains to be seen how schools will respond to this move.

This article is translated by Leikeji from CNN.

Original link: Google allows schools to turn off AI features, but the cost may be losing access to Google Search

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