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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

As usual, the truth is a little less clickbaity. It's just opt-in:

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/educatio...

> We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach. After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.

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Google blog says search will be off by default, alongside Gemini stuff.

And NYT says they would only be able to turn search on if they enable all of the Gemini stuff. That is not mentioned explicitly on google's blog. So not _that_ clickbaity?

> … and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.

So yeah the blog post says Google Search itself will be entirely off until being turned on. There’s nothing in this blog post to indicate whether Google Search can be turned on without also turning on Gemini. Although I hate the NYT, the NYT is quoting someone from Google saying there won’t be separate controls for Gemini and Google Search.

From the article, Google AI is deeply integrated with Google Search. So the article is correct - turning off one turns off the other.

From a privacy perspective, having all of this off by default is sensible. But only offering a basic product like Search if you opt into AI (when search as a capability does not need AI to function) - is newsworthy.

> when search as a capability does not need AI to function

That means a far less capable search engine. Note that Google search has been AI-powered since before AI became a thing; it's now just more advanced, and particularly, explicitly publicized.

How the sausage is made is irrelevant when the goal is to get students to research primary sources of which Google AI summaries cannot be.

I remember a time when Wikipedia wasn't allowed as a source. Few years later, no problem.

I've never seen Wikipedia accepted as a source. Mostly I've seen the shift to recommending people look at Wikipedia's citations as sources.

I've seen this OK'd in college, though the number of allowed Wikipedia citations was capped.

Does Google tie Gemini access for schools to their ability to train on the data and use it for ads and measurement like they have done to Android if you want to do anything halfway useful you used to do with Assistant before they killed it?

> 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.”

C'mon, it's right in the article.

The school can control AI on/off. Off means no search too.

Well their search engine is explicitly AI-driven; no AI, no search. Like you can't have juice that doesn't contain water.

> Like you can't have juice that doesn't contain water.

This particular bit of juice didn't have the "AI summaries" ingredient for 93% of its existence.

Schools invested enormously in Google Classroom and Google for Education, and now the deal's changing. Not for the benefit of students.

The water supply got an update. Reservoir instead of wells. There may be a difference in taste but you'll get used to it. Or learn to dig a well.

That's more honest, but quite the goalpost move.

The local population is probably allowed to complain that you built the reservoir with toxic waste, too, or that you filled the old well with construction debris.

It's not a goalpost move though, as there was never a guarantee to remain on well water.

But anyway I personally would find someone offering well water if I don't like the reservoir. And I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for search since they first appeared, so I've never had to deal with what Google's doing. I know the reservoir exists, but I've never drank from it.

> It's not a goalpost move though, as there was never a guarantee to remain on well water.

That sounds like an argument to never depend on Google for anything ever again under any circumstance short of severe punitive legislative action.

It really doesn't make sense to use a service and expect that service to not ever change (or be replaced), particularly when you're not the owner of said service. I love how HN is but I wouldn't blink if it changed tomorrow for example. Heck, there have been recent changes: there's now a filter system for LLM-generated content, for one.

It really doesn't make sense for businessowners to see themselves as independent from the society they operate in.

Especially in Google's case where they've invested so much into remaking how society works worldwide. To expect people to simply accept anything and everything Google wants to do just because they're a private business regardless of how many billions of people their actions affect?

Lunacy.

How you want businesses to work and how they actually work are different things. By default, a business has no relations to society beyond beyond those facilitating financial transactions in such a way that said business makes a profit for its owner/stakeholders. Anything else is adopted strictly with the purpose of advancing that primary purpose, or is externally mandated via regulation, community pressure, etc. An entity that doesn't prioritize profit (given no external pressure) isn't a business.

How you want governments to work and how they actually work are different things.

How you want public perception to work and how it actually works are different things.

It’s got what plants crave.

> Well their search engine is explicitly AI-driven; no AI, no search.

By “AI” you mean machine learning e.g. RankBrain, correct? Schools are clearly not opposed to that. Their contention is with the LLM-generated “AI summary” that sits on top of the ranked results.

Do you not understand those are two different things? That’s my most charitable conclusion. The less charitable conclusion is you are intentionally conflating generative AI (LLMs) with all machine learning, which is not how the term “AI” is used in this article or Google’s own marketing.

the problem is that it's bundled.

you either get search + all the ai stuff, or you get none of it. you can't just opt-in to search alone.

(in other words, title is accurate. block ai = no search)

the truth is not what you think is the truth

Search is off; if you want it back on, you get Gemini summaries with it. you can't get Search _without_ Gemini

Scummy wording makes it looks like google is giving more control, but it's really the opposite.

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