Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available. Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I. But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.

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.” Google is by far the dominant technology player in K-12 classrooms. Google’s suite of education apps — including Gmail, Docs and an assignment platform called Classroom — is ubiquitous. Google Chromebooks, low-cost laptops, are the most widely issued student devices in U.S. schools. And Google is synonymous with internet search, a crucial tool for students across the globe.

The company’s new strategy underscores Google’s powerful role in American education. If school leaders want continued student access to search within the company’s ecosystem, they will be forced to embrace Google’s A.I. In recent months, Google has been promoting its Gemini chatbot as a valuable educational tool, saying it can aid teachers in planning lessons and serve as a personalized tutor for students. A new student version of Gemini, Guided Learning, is supposed to make it harder for students to use A.I. to cheat.

“We’re evolving our approach,” said Mr. Phillips. He promised tools that would “support the productive struggle” of learning and tamp down on students turning to A.I. for easy answers. In August, Google turned on A.I. features as the default option inside its Classroom app for K-12 schools that had allowed students separate access to the company’s Gemini chatbot. The move upset some school leaders, who felt schools should be able to decide how and when students used Google’s A.I.

Google’s August change will now be reversed.

A parent movement has been pushing back against the use of A.I. in schools, and against screen time more generally. While A.I. chatbots can be useful tools for research and coding, they can also easily be used to cheat on school assignments and can provide false information. Research shows chatbots can also hinder critical thinking and ensnare adolescents in emotional dependency.

Last week, New York State passed a chatbot safety law that would prohibit companies from providing a variety of A.I. features for minors. And in September, the nation’s two largest school districts, in New York City and Los Angeles — both Google clients — broadly restricted student access to generative artificial intelligence on school devices. Officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District said at the time that they were hoping students would be able to conduct Google searches with A.I. overviews turned off. The overviews are A.I.-generated summaries that appear at the top of searches. They can dissuade students from seeking out multiple sources of information. On Monday, Google executives said that for districts that choose to allow A.I., there will be two options for search inside school-issued accounts, beginning in early 2027. One option will be search with A.I. overviews and A.I. chats turned on, similar to the current consumer experience. The other will be search using Guided Learning, the student version of Google’s Gemini chatbot.

Guided Learning is intended to guide students through a topic step-by-step without providing them with answers that could short-circuit learning. It is supposed to offer an experience modeled on one-to-one tutoring.

The consumer version of Guided Learning is already available within Gemini, and can enable cheating. In a reporter’s test, it produced a detailed essay in response to an Advanced Placement history prompt.

There are greater restrictions in the school version that is currently being piloted, according to Brit Mennuti, product lead for Google Classroom. She said teachers would be able to review students’ chatbot transcripts, among other capabilities.

I know a lot of people hate them, it's fashionable to hate them in the same way as It's fashionable to say "oh I can't do Maths" (nothing against my brothers-in-neurodiversity)

I bloody love a spreadsheet. I've worked on some crackers over the years. They're more art than science.. The presentation.. The innovation.. Learning a new function is like learning a new technique... They're never finished or perfect, you just have to stop making them one day and share them with the world.

I will die on this hill. Spreadsheets are art.

Comments

If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.

As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.

So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!

After a mind-bending & gut-busting battle in a windmill with evil mini versions of himself, Ash (Bruce Campbell) runs out into the night as another evil version emerges from his own body as a second head.

• Army of Darkness (Evil Dead III) (1993)
• Re-watched in the #SundayFunnies watch party on Mastodon
• On my collection of Action-Comedy-Horror Favourites

Opening them feels daunting the minute they come, and the longer I put them off due to that, the more guilt gets added to the mix too, so they just go unadressed.

Has anyone found a strategy that works for this?

Vote! It impacts your local elections more than you know!

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77930410

I'm interested in the Steam Machine's potential to be what the Xbox One wanted to be without the bullshit.

There are some Linux apps like Jellyfin (where I watch most stuff by far) but it seems like Waydroid can fill in a lot of the Android gaps that are missing. With a TV like remote.

This would need to have the family approval factor. No hoops to jump through for the wife, just launch apps and watch.

I'm sure there are some tradeoffs specifically in the DRM camp, but the only actual potential DRM app I use is Nebula so that might be fine. I currently watch YouTube via SmartTube to circumvent ads.

Ars there other tradeoffs I'm missing?

New YorkAP — A onetime West Point cadet drugged his then-girlfriend in her barracks room, administered abortion pills to her against her will and caused a miscarriage. Then he went on to study at two Ivy League universities, starting at one of them after he pleaded guilty to assault, according to court records and a new lawsuit.
The man, Caleb Suh, graduated from Cornell University this year and was a public health graduate student at Columbia University as of October 28, when the woman sued in a New York court. His current status at Columbia is unclear.

The suit drew attention to a case that had played out quietly at West Point and in federal court, where Suh pleaded guilty this past June to the March 2022 assault on a cadet in the class below him. She was 19 and in her second year at the US Military Academy, according to prosecutors.

She wanted to have the baby. Suh didn’t. Instead, he told the judge, he impersonated the woman to open an online pharmacy account, ordered abortion medications, got Xanax from a friend to use as a sedative, and duped his girlfriend into drinking what she thought was just a prenatal protein shake. After waiting until she fell asleep, he administered the abortion pills orally and vaginally.

Reddit users are called Redditors. What are Lemmy users called? Lemmitors? Lemmings?

How well are the Lemmy fediverses growing? How many daily unique users do we have on this service? Will we overtake Reddit someday?

What differences should I get used to over here from what I was used to on Reddit? Thanks in advance.