The American AI industry has a problem. In order to justify its explosive spending on AI infrastructure — data centers, essentially — firms like OpenAI and Google need to convert as many non-AI users into power users as they possibly can, ideally ones who are willing to pay monthly subscription fees for the privilege.
Much of this frenzy is unfolding at the corporate level, as AI labs chase enormous contracts with various enterprises, often leading to massive overspending and pushback from employees. Fortunately for AI companies, there’s a ready-made and untapped audience waiting to be converted into life-long users: kids, particularly ones in classrooms.
But fueling the tech industry’s quest for AI growth at all costs has come at a steep cost for students, whose formative school years are now increasingly mediated by AI chatbots. As the Wall Street Journal reported, students are well aware of the AI creeping into their classrooms and the consequences it has for their cognition — but in many cases are powerless to stem the rising tide of big tech.
“It slowed my thinking down,” Pennsylvania eighth-grader Richard Scott told the WSJ about Google’s AI assistant. “When I was in a test and I couldn’t use AI, it was hard to think.”
Despite receiving grades in the B-range in previous math classes, Scott’s transcript showed that he failed his eighth-grade final, after letting Google’s AI into his academic life over the course of a year.
In Miami, art history teacher Kaitlyn Ruano told the WSJ she watched as student grades plummeted after the school district rolled out Google’s Gemini chatbot to every student.
“I had kids come to class after saying, ‘miss, I had no clue what half the material was, I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve been using AI all year,’” she said.
As 15-year-old Sophia Chatzigianni told the WSJ, the “Google one was the biggest temptation, because it’s the easiest to access.” Chatzigianni’s grades reportedly tanked as she began relying on Google’s AI chatbot to summarize school material, a tool made available to her on her school-provided computer. After she quit using AI cold turkey, her grades began to improve.
The technology may be new, but Google’s strategy to hook users before they’re even able to vote or buy alcohol dates back decades.
All the way back in 2014, as Google’s Chromebooks and classroom software began to proliferate in schools throughout the nation, the tech giant admitted to scanning students’ emails in order to better slam them with targeted ads.
As internal Google documents dated to 2018 bragged, the growing presence of cheap Chromebooks and Google-mediated software formed a “pipeline of future users” that the company could bank on for years to come.
That’s horrifying enough. But given the open-ended nature of generative AI, students are now being corralled into a boundless tech ecosystem — and for a company like Google, that is precisely the point.
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