Google Temporarily Pauses AI-Powered 'Homework Helper' Button in Chrome Over Cheating Concerns (msn.com) 63
An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post:
A student taking an online quiz sees a button appear in their Chrome browser: "homework help." Soon, Google's artificial intelligence has read the question on-screen and suggests "choice B" as the answer. The temptation to cheat was suddenly just two clicks away Sept. 2, when Google quietly added a "homework help" button to Chrome, the world's most popular web browser. The button has been appearing automatically on the kinds of course websites used by the majority of American college students and many high-schoolers, too. Pressing it launches Google Lens, a service that reads what's on the page and can provide an "AI Overview" answer to questions — including during tests.
Educators I've spoken with are alarmed. Schools including Emory University, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley have alerted faculty how the button appears in the URL box of course sites and their limited ability to control it.
Chrome's cheating tool exemplifies Big Tech's continuing gold rush approach to AI: launch first, consider consequences later and let society clean up the mess. "Google is undermining academic integrity by shoving AI in students' faces during exams," says Ian Linkletter, a librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology who first flagged the issue to me. "Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal."
Several days after I contacted Google about the issue, the company told me it had temporarily paused the homework help button — but also didn't commit to keeping it off. "Students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually, so we're running tests offering an easier way to access Lens while browsing," Google spokesman Craig Ewer said in a statement.
Educators I've spoken with are alarmed. Schools including Emory University, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley have alerted faculty how the button appears in the URL box of course sites and their limited ability to control it.
Chrome's cheating tool exemplifies Big Tech's continuing gold rush approach to AI: launch first, consider consequences later and let society clean up the mess. "Google is undermining academic integrity by shoving AI in students' faces during exams," says Ian Linkletter, a librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology who first flagged the issue to me. "Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal."
Several days after I contacted Google about the issue, the company told me it had temporarily paused the homework help button — but also didn't commit to keeping it off. "Students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually, so we're running tests offering an easier way to access Lens while browsing," Google spokesman Craig Ewer said in a statement.
I think AI is great! (Score:3)
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All the moderators missed the joke and failed to give you a Funny?
Or perhaps all the moderators are AI? Slashdot's new (and secret) moderation policy is to only give mod points to accounts that can pass a reverse CATPCHA to prove they are NOT human?
Just asking questions? Of course not?!?
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Having your own thoughts? That just doesn't hit anymore, bro.
Humanities professor here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Humanities professor here (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think of the argument that great men (people) stand on the shoulders of others, and that AI is a shoulder?
The great men in question have all worked through the thoughts of those upon whose shoulders they stood. Even if you could make a case that LLMs understand the words they use (they don't: we all know they simply predict the likelihood that certain words will appear in a certain order in a certain context based on massive training), you certainly could not argue that those depending on LLMs (and in this case, we're talking about university students) have exercised the same care as, say, Newton did in in working through Kepler.
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Re:Humanities professor here (Score:5, Insightful)
While I am not the one you directed your question at, I think people have always been bad at questioning authority. There is a number from sociology that says only about 10-15% of all people are independent thinkers and only about 20% (including the former) can be convinced by rational argument. The rest does not question authority, unless they are following one that questions another authority and that is something else. The problem we currently have (again) is that so many authorities are of really bad quality.
As to a dystopia, I would say "not yet". Information technology certainly gives the usual authoritarians tools like never before in human history. The reactions to that ranges from embrace (China, and lately the US), to real efforts to limit that (Europe, but with caveats). Depending on how that ends, we might get a dominance of surveillance states on this planet, and that is certainly dystopian. There are also strong and raising fascist tendencies (using the Wikipedia definition) and not a lot of awareness how bad that is.
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I haven't seen nor heard of any kids that haven't at some point questioned, lied, hid info from, or ignored their parents. Thus everyone at some point in their lives questions authority. Not questioning it is something you're taught or you are simply too focused else where to spend time on.
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There is a difference between trying to not submit to authority because you do not want to (kids...) and actually fact-checking what said authority claims. Only the latter is relevant to this discussion.
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and I wonder if you think we are in one now?
You don't think the government telling journalists to only publish approved stories (or lose pentagon access) is dystopian?
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What about the argument, that many expert coders have no idea how a microprocessor works? I don't mean like assembly code, but how it actually works. They also will never learn it, they don't attempt to learn it, and still they would struggle if they can't type code but would have to wire something physically to implement their program. And the expert coder programming the complicated filters for a graphics program will probably never be as good in using them as the illustrators who will later on use the gr
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Sure we depend on machines, we use them to advance our present and describe our history, to a point. We talk about the "Eagle" lunar lander and astronauts Armstrong & Aldrin. Or, the "Nautilus" and Captain Nemo.
Pretending the machine is human, is a recipe for disaster. There's many novels about that very problem.
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Ah, yes. Animism. Not a sign of a strong mind. (That PhD is an indicator of, but not a sure sign of a smart person.)
As they are trained, general purpose LLMs are really just search engines with some aggregation and adaption capabilities. Obviously, no insight or understanding and obviously not a person in any way.
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As they are trained, general purpose LLMs are really just search engines with some aggregation and adaption capabilities.
I think you undersell the aggregation/adaptation part: plain search engines don't simply make shit up. They're more like search engines with a massive, ad-hoc compression scheme on the data which feeds the results through a huge aggregation system.
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And what is wrong with referring to machines as "he", "him", "she", "her"? Sailors have considered their ships as female since forever. "She's a fine ship". Likewise for trains and other machines.
Meanwhile my Czech father spoke English very well but after decades in England still referred to pretty much anything as a "he" or "she". Seems everything in the Czech language has a gender.
None of this means one literally attributes machines with feelings, sounds or conciseness or whatever else you think is unique
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Why do you care what someone calls a machine?
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Great folk stand on the shoulders of others, not on the metaphorical crutches of others.
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(*) On the Internet. Badly.
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I think nothing of that argument, it is a word game.
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Freedom should feel like we can eat when we are hungry, are clothed when we are naked, and we have a roof when it is raining.
That one is dangerous. You just nicely summed up what Adolf Hitler promised the Germans and what got him elected. And, to be fair, he delivered on those promises. For most. And with rather crass caveats. I am sure you did not intend that, but freedom always and critically includes freedom of mind and speech and access to knowledge and education.
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If I can get my students to think autonomously, and learn how to articulate their thoughts persuasively, and not simply copy the educated guesses of LLMs, my students come out ahead.
Indeed. And if you do not at least try to do that, you are cheating them.
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I actually agree with you in principle. I taught math and philosophy at a community college after getting my CS degree, before transitioning to corporate America as a sysadmin on steroids. You do have a point. It’s your classroom, and you’re right that none of us really knows what the future looks like. As Heinlein put it, “Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment, harsh. And there is no appeal—you live and you learn, or you don’t live long.”
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My point about coding - which I have been doing for fun since the 1980s (I am on /. after all) - is that it was taken as obvious that it was the future-proof skill. Not many people would argue this now.
As for tools - a tool is task specific. A carpenter without a hammer or saw is clearly at a disadvantage. And carpenters have always had these tools. But Homer, for instance, did not even have a pen or ink. He composed orally. The tools of thinking are experience, memory, and logic. My point is that thinking
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I take your point about “coding”—but I can and will argue that the deeper future-proof skill was never just programming, it was information systems. Coding was only ever a part of that larger shift: how humans structure, access, and reason about knowledge in a digital world.
Invoking Homer as proof of tool-free cognition is flawed. It's been awhile since Humanities 101 for me, but I learned that the repetitive epithets, stock scenes, and metrical formulas of the Iliad and Odyssey were preci
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Weird - I posted the following earlier but it has disappeared.
Invoking Homer as proof of tool-free cognition is flawed. It's been awhile since Humanities 101 for me, but I learned that the repetitive epithets, stock scenes, and metrical formulas of the Iliad and Odyssey were precisely the tools that allowed Homer (and the oral tradition that predated him by centuries) to knit those works together. Oral poetry was itself a cognitive technology. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey were works of oral engineering, not free form artistry. You are a humanities professor -- you should know this. The “tools of thinking” have always included external scaffolds, whether carved in stone, written on parchment, or spoken in hexameter.
Not sure what this adds to or detracts from my position (besides the unwarranted invective). You said exactly what I said. Homer's tools are interior, belonging to the mind itself - although you had some newspeak like cognitive technology and oral engineering. And his poetry was passed on orally for generations, which means that people had to memorize it - which is the point of the mental tools you mentioned: tropes, repetitions, rhymers, epithe
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Invoking Homer as proof of tool-free cognition is flawed. It's been awhile since Humanities 101 for me, but I learned that the repetitive epithets, stock scenes, and metrical formulas of the Iliad and Odyssey were precisely the tools that allowed Homer (and the oral tradition that predated him by centuries) to knit those works together. Oral poetry was itself a cognitive technology. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey were works of oral engineering, not free form artistry. You are a humanities professor -- you should know this. The “tools of thinking” have always included external scaffolds, whether carved in stone, written on parchment, or spoken in hexameter.
Not sure what this adds to or detracts from my position (besides the unwarranted invective). You said exactly what I said. Homer's tools are interior, belonging to the mind itself - although you had some newspeak like cognitive technology and oral engineering. And his poetry was passed on orally for generations, which means that people had to memorize it - which is the point of the mental tools you mentioned: tropes, repetitions, rhymers, epithets, etc. I argue that these mental tools are of the sort that should be learned and sharpened, so to speak (and in hindsight, I forgot to mention imagination), because they are proper to thinking.
We are not saying the same thing at all. When you recast Homer’s scaffolds as “interior mental tools,” that’s a category error — you’re collapsing cultural, external techniques into innate faculties like memory and imagination. Repetitive epithets and metrical formulas weren’t born in the head of a single poet; they were centuries-old mnemonic scaffolds. it sidesteps the reality that cognition has always been tool-extended. Calling them ‘interior’ isn
USE Google and f*ck you (Score:2)
Google is attempting vendor lock-in, fuck everyone else. What sells matters (to rich people), the impending idiocracy doesn't.
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The evolution of Google, already long ago, was s/don't//.
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They changed it to "do the right thing" leaving open right thing for whom.
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I disagree.
If you are stuck in a problem. You have two options:
1. Seek for help
2. Leave it unsolved.
There are different levels of help, but in this case lets just go with the blurting correct answer.
When you have the correct answer you have two options:
1. Just accept it and copy it to your answer
2. Try to understand how the answer was generated and try to mimic that by doing the solution by yourself.
If you do the second option, you can learn. It might not be the best method (or it could), but at least it is
Just do all exams in person (Score:3)
Pen and paper. Problem solved.
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Who cares about cursive? I stopped using cursive the day I was out of school. Writing faster using cursive? Nope. Writing clearer? Not really. More beautiful? I you write really slow and give it a lot of effort, yes. But for what? Learn to write nice distinct block letters and spare you and your readers headache thinking about wtf you've written there.
Re: Just do all exams in person (Score:2)
In my opinion, saying cursive is irrelevant is like say music, or musical training is irrelevant. You are opening pathways in your brain, creating preconditions for abstract thought and problem solving.
If you think of education strictly in terms of turning out workers
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I am also using my hands when writing in block letters. No need to use cursive for that. I also kinda agree that handwriting is another process than typing when it comes to learning, but that doesn't need cursive either.
If someone wants to write cursive as hobby, for artistic reasons or to challenge themselves, I am absolutely fine with it. But I see little benefit to force it on others.
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https://neurosciencenews.com/h... [neurosciencenews.com]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
â¦offering a variety of options likely suits different students thoughâ¦
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I believe the handwriting part, in particular also because of things like using different brain hemispheres and so on, but I don't believe the cursive part, at least for me. I mean who likes it should do it, but I am faster without, it is easier to write for me and easier to read for me.
I of course have no handwriting like a computer font, some letters may look a bit more like cursive, others a bit less, but overall I use simple and good to read letters. I often still prefer to type it afterward, handwritin
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Yes. I do that for my CS students. I have never had to justify that even once, as they all understand what it is about.
Re: Just do all exams in person (Score:2)
Talking a out CS, my programming uni teacher made us write all exams on paper, too. He'd take our code home, type into his IDE and then grade. If it didn't compile/ had syntax errors - it was an instant fail.
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Coding exams (which I do not do) are a problem. You should have the documentation, an editor and the compiler, but no AI. In principle easy to do, you just need a computer room set up for this. But the decision makers are often too cheap to do it and do not understand the need anyways.
Re: Just do all exams in person (Score:2)
No news (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most schools these days seem to use browsers specifically designed to not allow that, generally referred to as Lockdown Browsers. How effective this is is a different conversation, of course.
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What's new is that the AI is being pushed directly to kids ("homework help") in a context where they are most definitely going to be tempted to use it.
The product has been designed to lure kids who otherwise may not have cheated. It's designed to make the kids beholden to the product, unable to learn or function without it. Addicted.
It's disgusting, and it's critical that people know about it. It is news. The fuck is wrong with you?
apparently no one noticed this (Score:2)
"Students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually, so we're running tests offering an easier way to access Lens while browsing,"
So Google thinks students wanting to cheat on homework are their clients, not the parents and teachers, and Google has the nerve to then imply that their AI is a tool to help students learn.
Hmm (Score:2)
"Homework Help" has always been one tab away.
Sure, a button making it easier is a bad look, but ... nothing is really changing here, I think.
Homework has to change (Score:2)
No matter if you like it or not, today we have tools that cannot just give the answers, but which give you the answers after you upload a bad quality photo of the assignment sheet. If you really think you can get someone unmotivated to work on it alone without cheating, you're naive.
Online ed was flawed long before AI arrived (Score:2)
I remember when “online classes” were basically diploma mills farming credential seekers who figured an MS or MFA would boost their career options. Nobody who took education seriously considered them legitimate—the same way upper management quietly ignored “University of Phoenix” or “ITT Tech” listed on a résumé. If your education came from one of those places, you weren’t educated. You were just a credentialed cosplayer.
Covid changed that. The pande
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I think online education is a very good thing and I have seen it to actually work.
It has a couple of requirements:
1. Material has to be good
2. You need to have exercises which you can solve using the material. This requires that you have to test those materials with several people before actually using them, to make sure assignments are not misunderstood and that everything students need is available.
3. I recommend that you don't give grade on assignments. Instead you should give students an opportunity to
I have to be honest (Score:2)
... I'm more concerned about how *astonishingly* fucking stupid Google as an organization must be that nobody along the way from dev to testing to implementation apparently considered this?
This isn't me writing some macro in Excel that doesn't work. This is Google. 50? 100? ...or even more people had to touch this before it went live on afaik the biggest browser in the world on what 3-5 BILLION machines?