“We write with grave concern that Google’s aggressive push of AI products to children in schools is threatening the academic success and overall wellbeing of an entire generation,” Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley wrote in a recent letter to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. At a news conference today outside the State Capitol, CEA President Kate Dias joined Blumenthal to highlight concerns about AI’s impact on today’s students.
“Google is selling products that actually cause students to test lower, think slower, and often encounter real behavioral issues,” Blumenthal said. “AI is a boon. It can have great promise, but at the same time it has perils.”
Blumenthal said that because of Google’s pervasive presence in schools, students and teachers are often unable to avoid AI.
“Very often AI is embedded in the classroom because Google pushes its products aggressively and relentlessly. And it forces these products on children who are paying the price while Google is reaping the profits.”
Blumenthal said that students’ independent thinking is suffering, they are less prepared for life after high school, and they are more emotionally anxious and often manipulated by AI bots that mimic affection and empathy.
“Google is a trusted partner for most schools,” Dias said. “During the pandemic we invited Google in as a solution that helped us figure out how to navigate a really difficult home-school connection. Now Google is violating our trust by embedding AI that we cannot turn off into the very systems that we rely upon to communicate, share, and educate our children.”
Explaining why AI use is particularly dangerous for students, Dias said that it is precisely the struggle to puzzle out problems and write rough drafts and refine them that leads to learning.
“It’s not getting it right the first time that allows us to become better and better. AI functionally robs our children of the opportunity to grow, and what a crime that is, because that’s where our children are finding themselves anxious because they don’t have the resilience. We are robbing them of the opportunity to get smarter, because when you fail you learn, you grow, you change, you evolve, you test ideas. This is how every single major advancement, including AI, has ever evolved,” she said.
“We believe that Google is aware that they are exacerbating student problems—educational problems, behavioral problems,” Blumenthal said. “We believe that they are aware what they’re doing, but they decided that making more money is more important than protecting students.”
“We’re not going to get rid of technology,” Dias said. “Technology is here to stay, but I do think we have to be very protective of the purpose and function of public education, and the purpose and function of public education is not to create a new marketplace for technology.”
She continued, “I am deeply grateful for the letter that Senators Blumenthal and Hawley have drafted. I’m excited that hopefully we can shed light on what some of the true practices are, because only through transparency can we get to the answers that we desperately need. Unfortunately, until we have meaningful guardrails, teachers like myself are going to have to continue to edit the involvement of AI and its intrusive practices and policies into our classrooms because our children deserve that.”
