The classroom has become an adoption channel
The Wall Street Journal reported that students are noticing AI’s effects on how they think, but often cannot stop its spread at school.
An eighth-grader in Pennsylvania, Richard Scott, said Google’s assistant slowed his thinking. On a test where AI was prohibited, he struggled to think independently. Scott had previously earned B-level grades in math, but his report card showed he failed the eighth-grade final exam after increasingly using Google’s AI for schoolwork.
In Miami, art history teacher Kaitlyn Ruano told the Journal that student grades fell sharply after the school district gave all students access to Google Gemini. Some students told her they had used AI throughout the year and arrived in class without understanding half the material.
Fifteen-year-old Sofia Chatziani said Google’s chatbot was the strongest temptation because it was the easiest to access. Her grades reportedly worsened after she began relying on it to summarize school material. The chatbot was available on her school-issued computer. After she stopped using AI altogether, her grades began to improve.
Google’s long game with young users
The technology may be new, but Google’s effort to bring in users before they can vote or buy alcohol goes back decades.
Generative AI extends that strategy. Its open-ended nature can place students inside a technology environment with few clear boundaries. For Google, that is the point.
The wider industry also has a reason to seek new users: companies such as OpenAI and Google need to justify enormous AI infrastructure spending, especially on data centers. Much of the adoption drive is aimed at businesses, where big deals can bring excessive spending and employee dissatisfaction. Schoolchildren offer another audience that could become habitual users over many years.
I think the classroom examples point to a gap the adoption story leaves unanswered: who is responsible for making sure students can still do the work without a chatbot? The reports describe students reaching for the easiest available tool, and some struggling when it is taken away. If schools become the place where AI habits are formed, the cost of growth may show up in skills students need when the tool is not there.
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