A Google tool exposes weaknesses in schools’ AI policy

A few months ago, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles Unified noticed something different about his students’ tests. Students who had struggled all semester were suddenly getting A’s. He suspected some were cheating, but he couldn't figure out how.

- By Carolyn Jones

LAUREN JUSTICE CalMatters

SOME TEACHERS say artificial intelligence tools make enforcing academic integrity impossible.

Until a student showed him the latest version of Google Lens.

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 movable 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 dois 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.

Lens has been around for nearly adecade. It’s the camera technology that scans QR codes or identifies objects in photos. But as AI has evolved, its uses have expanded, and Google has made it more available to users, especially those using Chrome, the Google browser.

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.