is a NYC-based AI reporter and is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. She covers AI companies, policies, and products.
AI companies know that children are the future — of their business model. The industry doesn’t hide their attempts to hook the youth on their products through well-timed promotional offers, discounts, and referral programs. “Here to help you through finals,” OpenAI said during a giveaway of ChatGPT Plus to college students. Students get free yearlong access to Google’s and Perplexity’s pricey AI products. Perplexity even pays referrers $20 for each US student that it gets to download its AI browser Comet.
Popularity of AI tools among teens is astronomical. Once the product makes its way through the education system, it’s the teachers and students who are stuck with the repercussions; teachers struggle to keep up with new ways their students are gaming the system, and their students are at risk of not learning how to learn at all, educators warn.
This has gotten even more automated with the newest AI technology, AI agents, which can complete online tasks for you. (Albeit slowly, as The Verge has seen in tests of several agents on the market.) These tools are making things worse by making it easier to cheat. Meanwhile tech companies play hot potato with the responsibility for how their tools can be used, often just blaming the students they’ve empowered with a seemingly unstoppable cheating machine.
Perplexity actually appears to lean into its reputation as a cheating tool. It released a Facebook ad in early October that showed a “student” discussing how his “peers” use Comet’s AI agent to do their multiple-choice homework. In another ad posted the same day to the company’s Instagram page, an actor tells students that the browser can take quizzes on their behalf. “But I’m not the one telling you this,” she says. When a video of Perplexity’s agent completing someone’s online homework — the exact use case in the company’s ads — appeared on X, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas reposted the video, quipping, “Absolutely don’t do this.”
When The Verge asked for a response to concerns that Perplexity’s AI agents were used to cheat, spokesperson Beejoli Shah said that “every learning tool since the abacus has been used for cheating. What generations of wise people have known since then is cheaters in school ultimately only cheat themselves.”
In another video, ChatGPT’s agent pretends to be a student on an assignment meant to help classmates get to know each other. “It actually introduced itself as me … so that kind of blew my mind,” the video’s creator, college instructional designer Yun Moh, told The Verge.
Canvas is the flagship product of parent company Instructure, which claims to have tens of millions of users, including those at “every Ivy League school” and “40% of U.S. K–12 districts.” Moh wanted the company to block AI agents from pretending to be students. He asked Instructure in its community ideas forum and sent an email to a company sales rep, citing concerns of “potential abuse by students.” He included the video of the agent doing Moh’s fake homework for him.
It took nearly a month for Moh to hear from Instructure’s executive team. On the topic of blocking AI agents from their platform, they seemed to suggest that this was not a problem with a technical solution, but a philosophical one, and in any case, it should not stand in the way of progress:
“We believe that instead of simply blocking AI altogether, we want to create new pedagogically-sound ways to use the technology that actually prevent cheating and create greater transparency in how students are using it. “So, while we will always support work to prevent cheating and protect academic integrity, like that of our partners in browser lockdown, proctoring, and cheating-detection, we will not shy away from building powerful, transformative tools that can unlock new ways of teaching and learning. The future of education is too important to be stalled by the fear of misuse.”
... continue reading