A California teacher's students suddenly started getting A's. Did a Google AI tool go too far?

"Google had recently made the visual search tool easier to use on the company's Chrome browser. When users click on an icon hidden in the tool bar, a moveable bubble pops up. Wherever the bubble is placed, a sidebar appears with an artificial intelligence answer, description, explanation or interpretation of whatever is inside the bubble. For students, it provides an easy way to cheat on digital tests without typing in a prompt, or even leaving the page. All they have to do is click."

"I couldn't believe it, said teacher Dustin Stevenson. It's hard enough to teach in the age of AI, and now we have to navigate this? Keeping up with students' methods of cheating has always been a cat-and-mouse game for teachers. But some now say that AI tools, particularly Lens, have made it impossible to enforce academic integrity in the classroom with potentially harmful long-term effects on students' learning."

"During the COVID school closures, most school districts in California gave students Chromebook laptops to do remote work. Thousands of those laptops were actually donated by Google. After schools reopened for in-person learning, schools kept using the Chromebooks, making them an integral part of classroom instruction. Millions of California's 5.8 million K-12 students use Chromebooks, making it by far the most popular laptop option in schools."

A high school English teacher in Los Angeles Unified noticed students who had struggled all semester suddenly getting A's and traced the cause to Google Lens. Google updated Lens in Chrome so an icon in the toolbar opens a movable bubble that produces a sidebar with AI answers, descriptions, explanations or interpretations of whatever the bubble covers. Students can use it to cheat on digital tests without typing prompts or leaving the page. Lens evolved from camera QR-code scanning to broader AI uses. Chromebooks became widespread during COVID closures and remain the dominant K-12 laptop, complicating enforcement of academic integrity.

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