Google's New Gemini for Students Puts Double-Check Feature Front and Center

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Google Workspace for Education is bringing Gemini, the company's generative AI assistant, to students, free of charge, allowing teens to access AI to help with brainstorming, homework and other tasks.

Google says Gemini can guide students and provide real-time feedback to their queries about school subjects, based on the volumes of information built into its language model. In addition, this version of Gemini will run a double-check feature that looks across the web to ensure responses are accurate. Double-check does exist in the consumer version of Gemini, but isn't automatic like it is for classrooms. In the consumer version, there's a Google logo at the bottom of responses that needs to be clicked.

Gemini for students will be made available to those 13 years or older in the coming months and will be off by default. It also has guardrails in place to keep teens safe from inappropriate content.

Given concerns about privacy, Google says it won't use chat data from its education users to train its AI models.

Google's introduction of AI into Workspace for Education, formerly named Google Classroom, isn't surprising. The company has invested heavily in integrating its products into classrooms around the country for nearly two decades. This includes giving students and teachers access to Google's suite of apps like Gmail and Docs and creating software for teachers to help put together assignments, class materials and quizzes.

It's not just Google. Microsoft and Apple also push their products to students and teachers. All that activity has the education technology market on track to hit $550 billion by 2033, according to Market.us. Beyond the initial profits, getting students hooked early can make them lifelong customers, or, at least that's the hope from Big Tech, according to one analyst. Google says 150 million people worldwide are using Workspace for Education and 50 million teachers and students are using Chromebooks.

While bringing Gemini to educators could have benefits for teachers and students, there are notable potential drawbacks as well. Google's AI tech, like other chatbots, can sometimes hallucinate, or make stuff up. When I reviewed the free version of Google Gemini earlier this year, I found it to hallucinate more than other AI chatbots. It made up the names of restaurants, research papers and even YouTube videos. Last month when Google began rolling out its Gemini-driven AI Overviews in search results, people quickly began reporting wrong, dangerous and absurd statements, such as  suggesting people put glue on their pizza or eat rocks.

"We recognize that it is still early days for this technology and want to provide clear signs to users throughout the products that they should carefully review information that's presented as fact, and when in doubt, double check it with Google Search," a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson emphasized the importance of the built-in double-check feature and that early user feedback has been positive. Google said the same thing about early feedback on AI Overviews before it went live last month.

There are also other concerns educators have with AI more broadly, from plagiarism to having AI do a student's work or even create nudes of their classmates.

Other AI tools Google is pushing in classrooms include Read Along, which is designed to help students improve their reading and will soon create stories that cater to an individual's interests. Google's LearnLM AI model can help teachers create instructions for different groups of students based on their needs.