Today, Google announced a $1 billion investment "in AI Education and job training programs and research in the U.S." This includes offering all U.S. college students a free one-year subscription to its Google AI Pro plan. After this free trial, it'll revert to $20/month. Here's the announcement: Google’s Bringing the best AI tools to college students for free

Google is pitching this as a way to help students "study smarter, not harder" and become "AI fluent." More realistically, Google is essentially advertising a way for students to outsource their thinking while avoiding reading and writing. From their own marketing materials here and here, this is how they're selling it:

Homework help & exam prep
Analyze entire textbooks up to 1,500 pages

Why bother reading a textbook when you can get free Gemini summaries of its content instead?

Writing help
Generate a first draft, work on your arguments and fine-tune your ideas

Who needs to write a first draft? Gemini can write for you!

Polish rough drafts and refine your writing with a 24/7 writing coach.

You don't need to write a final draft either: Gemini will take the first draft it generated and polish and refine it. The claim about it being a "writing coach" is laughable--writing coaches don't write for you. Gemini does.

The announcement discusses Gemini's new "Guided Learning" mode. This new mode

acts as a learning companion guiding you with questions and step-by-step support instead of just giving you the answer.

Please explain, Google: why would students use this when they can use regular Gemini mode and get the answer immediately?

Under the guise of helping students "study smarter, not harder" and become "AI fluent," Google is hastening the demise of education to further their own bottom line. Google's hope is to get college students hooked on this one-year free trial as a way to essentially cheat their way through a year of college and then start forking over $20/mo when the trial ends to keep cheating.

Now more than ever, we need people who know how to think for themselves. These tech companies have already done so much damage by getting people addicted to phone notifications and social media, which we now know is hurting mental health, attention spans, and reading stamina. Not satisfied with the damage that caused, they're now going to dramatically undermine the ability of students to think critically whatsoever.

Sorry this post is so negative, but I don't want to be part of the last generation of people who knows how to think. This post is also just me yelling into the void though. These tech companies are going to push forward and get their AI money regardless of the impacts on education and society. All while smiling and telling us that they're actually helping. This is just incredibly sad.

Holy shit! $20 in my country can buy you food for a whole week, this is insane!