Kelley L Cox/Reuters
- Google's school AI debate raises a bigger question about what rejecting this technology means.
- The stuff we love, including Google Search, Instagram feeds, and Netflix recommendations, runs on AI.
- Schools face the challenge of teaching students to question AI answers and investigate sources.
Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.
Google sparked a fierce debate this week by announcing that schools rejecting AI would lose access to its ubiquitous search engine.
The internet giant plans to turn off its AI services for students by default next year, in response to pressure from some schools that want more control over the technology.
But there's a catch: Google Search is an AI product, through and through. Schools don't want AI, so they won't get Search.
The news sparked immediate criticism of Google, and a lively debate among Business Insider journalists, including me.
The episode raises a much bigger question, especially in the wake of midterm elections that revealed the scale of the AI backlash: When people say they don't want AI, what exactly do they mean?
It's an important distinction because AI is woven into so many things we use and love every day.
Take Instagram. The feed that keeps you scrolling is powered by AI that figures out what you want to see. Netflix uses AI to recommend your next favorite show. Spotify uses it to discover music you'll probably love. Hundreds of other services we rely on every day are powered by AI, often without us realizing.
And Google Search? That's been powered by AI for at least a decade.
If you really want to ban AI, you might have to give up some of your favorite experiences. And yes, all the data centers powering this technology are part of the bargain, too.
Why we care
I understand why people have strong feelings about this. The world's leading AI company, Anthropic, warns that AI could either put us out of work or kill us. In the meantime, we have to pay extra for our electricity, while the data centers hum annoyingly in the background.
The Google situation with schools is especially fraught, especially for journalists and educators.
Journalism is fundamentally about finding and verifying facts. Reporters seek out original documents, interview people with firsthand knowledge, and question competing claims. We're trying to produce a reliable first draft of history.
Education has a similar mission: Teaching young people to find trustworthy information from primary sources, interrogate those sources, and make informed decisions.
Generative AI threatens to undermine that process.
Traditional Google Search generally pointed people toward websites where they could investigate information themselves. Google Search's newer AI Overviews and AI Mode, like ChatGPT, increasingly summarize that information and deliver answers directly.
That's convenient. Often wonderfully so. But it also puts another layer between students and the original evidence.
One Business Insider colleague argued that there's a fundamental difference between technology that helps you find reliable sources online and a chatbot that simply hands you an answer. He's right.
Students who never learn to investigate sources themselves risk becoming adults who can't distinguish fact from fiction.
Google could turn back the clock?
Here's another uncomfortable truth, though: This new way of finding information online isn't going away.
There's an important distinction between AI and generative AI, the newer technology that creates answers (aka AI answer engines).
Google has used AI to understand searches and rank websites and other digital information for more than a decade. Its RankBrain technology arrived in 2015, for example. BERT, a Google large language model that used the transformer architecture at the core of today's AI revolution, started powering Search in late 2019.
Generative AI goes further using similar technology, producing summaries that can reduce the need to visit original sources.
Today, Google could offer schools a stripped-down version of Search without AI Overviews or AI Mode, while retaining the older AI technology that helps organize results.
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, a company that helps businesses grow through search engines and AI, told me this is technically possible.
"I think they just don't want to because it's not worth the effort," he said.
Smith believes demand for a search experience free of generative AI features would be tiny. People may complain about AI, but that doesn't mean they'll sacrifice convenience to avoid it.
"People say they don't like AI, but they like it, and especially if they don't know that it's AI," he told me.
Attention is all you need, again
There's a powerful business reason for Google to keep evolving Search to be more generative: ChatGPT is coming after its search business.
As my colleague Katie Notopoulos reported this week, an OpenAI executive recently said ChatGPT now handles search-like requests equivalent to roughly 20% of Google's search volume.
That's not the same as having 20% of the search market. But it's a remarkable indication of how quickly consumer habits are changing.
Many people prefer asking ChatGPT a question and getting a useful answer, rather than wading through a list of web links.
Google can't afford to let OpenAI capture that attention, especially among young people developing lifelong habits. A big third-quarter miss on Google Search revenue adds pressure to evolve.
The real question is how kids should learn
In the education realm, Google's solution is to keep Search on this clear AI path, but offer schools more control while changing how its AI answers students' questions.
The company clarified that schools can independently enable Search, the Gemini chatbot, and a related service known as Gemini Notebook. Crucially, Search will still include generative AI, but its educational features will guide students through problems rather than immediately supplying answers.
This resembles OpenAI's Study Mode, which launched last year to make ChatGPT more like a patient tutor than a homework-answer machine.
Whether these approaches actually improve learning remains an open question. But simply declaring classrooms AI-free isn't a solution.
The goal of education isn't accumulating facts. It's learning how to think, investigate, question, and keep growing throughout life.
AI can help with that. It can also undermine it. The challenge is teaching children the difference.
And before we demand a world without AI, we should ask ourselves a simple question: How much of the technology we use would we really be willing to give up?
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