“Stop Stealing Our Imaginations”: Kids and Parents Are Protesting Google’s Classroom AI

Kelly Clancy speaks at a protest against Google's AI in New York City public schools. Alex Nguyen Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Parents, students, educators, union members, artists, creatives, and community members stood outside Google’s New York City headquarters, located in the eerie corporate section of Manhattan’s Hudson Square neighborhood on Wednesday afternoon to protest Google pushing its AI technology into schools. It was a family event: Attendees of all ages held signs reading, “NO AI IN MY SCHOOL!”, “A.I. Gets an F,” “Stop stealing our imaginations,” and “SCHOOL Librarians = THE BEST Search Engines.” Some students handed out fliers to passersby while younger children ran around and drew pictures off to the side. Many cars driving by honked their horns in support, and a few construction workers on the other side of the one-way street cheered the protesters on. Rallies also took place on Wednesday in six other cities—Los Angeles; Chicago; Boston; Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; and Durham, North Carolina—organized by a nationwide alliance of parent advocacy organizations. Just over a week earlier, on Election Day, Google announced that it would turn off its AI tools for school systems unless administrators choose to turn them on. But among these AI tools is Google Search, which has become synonymous with how to seek information on the internet. With New York City enacting a one-year AI moratorium on generative AI use for many elementary and middle school students, schools would lose Google’s search capacity entirely. Some other major public school systems, like the Los Angeles Unified School District, have also widely limited student access to generative AI on school devices. Both New York City and Los Angeles are Google clients. In an effort to quickly set up remote learning programs during the early years of the Covid pandemic, many school districts invested in Google Chromebooks, which were notably more affordable than Windows and Apple computers. Incorporating Chromebooks in the classroom—and according to what some parents told me, into homes where many students use them for homework—is pervasive, as these schools integrate the hardware with Google Classroom, which manages assignments, posts announcements, syncs with Google Calendar and Google Drive, and includes built-in AI tools through Google Gemini. The day after Google’s announcement, Google became the subject of a lawsuit alleging that the Gemini chatbot accessed through her school-issued Chromebook diagnosed Emma, a 13-year-old girl in North Carolina, with severe psychological disorders, and assisted her in planning her suicide and funeral over a span of several months—allegedly coaching her to conceal self-harm from her family and friends. (The school’s monitoring systems reportedly flagged the activity eventually to a former school counselor who had left nine months prior. The school alerted Emma’s parents, who intervened.) A Google spokesperson told Gizmodo last week that the firm was taking the lawsuit’s allegations “very seriously.” “We’ve worked extensively with medical professionals and academic experts,” the spokesperson added. “When people’s queries indicate they may be experiencing a crisis we show hotline information directly in Search to connect them with real-world support.” Kelly Clancy, a parent of three, organizes with a coalition calling for a two-year pause on all generative AI in New York City’s K-12 public schools to allow time for a research-backed process to evaluate the roles AI products should have. She told me that she logged in to her kids’ school-issued Google profiles with her own computer to test what they were allowed to access. According to Clancy, students can still access Gemini on tablets and phones at school, which reverts to Google’s AI chat. “When my son typed ‘AI sucks’—because he’s 12—it started behaving as a companion bot, telling him it was here to listen and that it heard him,” Clancy said. A New York City protester against Google AI tools in schools holds up a sign reading “SCHOOL Librarians = THE BEST Search Engines.”Greg Pak Craig, a parent with a daughter in second grade in Brooklyn, said on Wednesday that while Google’s tech poses wider problems—such as consuming more energy than entire countries and driving up carbon emissions with data centers—ordinary people can still “quit using Google products.” Sam, a former teacher and mom to a fourth grader, organizes in New York City with Schools Beyond Screens, a national coalition of parents and educators pushing for evidence-based limits on digital technology in classrooms. She said she circulated a petition that now has over 600 signatures to that effect. One question parents raised: “Why are we trusting and enabling billionaires with our children’s education, with their futures?” Ethan Sacks from Comix Action, a group of NYC-area organizing comics creators, holds up a sign reading “A.I. Gets an F.”Greg Pak At Wednesday’s protest, New York State Sen. Andrew Gounardes said he was “radicalized” when his kids entered school. Gounardes proposed the Fostering Optimal Classroom Use of Screens (FOCUS) Act, where schools would largely be required to offer screen-free learning to students from pre-K to fifth grade. Naveed Hasan, an elected member of New York City’s board of education, told me that the groundwork for problems with AI tech in schools came when Mayor Mike Bloomberg took control over the city’s public school system from the state government in 2002, abolishing boards that govern the city’s 32 community school districts and creating a “top-down system.” “There’s no way that one person can direct 900,000 students worth of policy. We have dozens of neighborhoods with different ethnicities and languages, wants and needs,” Hasan said, arguing that schools need to be allowed “some freedom to do the thing they need to do for their communities.”