So Google’s been pushing their AI stuff into student-facing products for a while now and I keep going back and forth on whether it’s actually helpful or whether it’s just Google colonizing another space.
Like Gemini integration in Workspace is genuinely useful for some things. Summarizing a long doc. Drafting a starting point for an email. But for actual academic work? I’m not convinced. The outputs feel pretty safe and surface-level, and the citation thing is still a mess. I’ve had it confidently suggest sources that don’t exist.
The other issue is that it’s Google. Everything you’re writing is going through their systems. For a CS student that at least registers as a thing to think about. What’s being retained. What’s being used to train what.
I’m not saying the tools are useless. I use them. I just don’t think the ‘AI tools for students’ framing that Google does is fully honest about what students are actually getting vs. what Google is getting out of it.
Anyone using these tools seriously for coursework? Curious what the actual use cases are holding up.
the hallucination thing is the killer for me. i’ve learned to just not trust any source it gives me without checking and at that point i might as well have just searched myself. useful for brainstorming though, like if i need to figure out what angle to take on something
The data privacy angle you’re raising is legit. I’d always check what the terms say about retention and training data use before putting anything sensitive into a Google-integrated tool. Most people don’t. They should.
The citation problem isn’t specific to Google, it’s just more dangerous for students because they’re often writing in contexts where a fabricated source is an integrity issue, not just a quality issue. Any AI tool used for academic research needs a human verification step. That’s not optional and it’s not the tool’s job to make it optional.
Outside academia, these tools are genuinely useful at scale. For a student doing coursework, the value proposition is shakier because the use cases that work well (drafting, summarizing, ideating) are exactly the ones most courses are trying to assess directly. The tool is useful precisely where you’re not supposed to use it.
From a product standpoint, student-facing AI tools are a land grab. Google, Microsoft, everyone. The immediate utility is real but secondary to the long-term goal of embedding these tools in the workflow of people who will be professional users in five years. It’s smart product strategy. Whether it’s good for students is a genuinely separate question that doesn’t always get asked.