As a former educator, I was pained to discover that my 15-year-old had been outsourcing her education to a chatbot. How did I find out? Simple. The story was too good.
She had a creative writing assignment, and I was excited when she asked me for help. When she walked me through her idea, though, I wasn’t impressed so much as suspicious.
“That’s really detailed,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“It sounds like a TV show.”
“Yeah, it’s an episode of The Rookie, but she doesn’t know that.”
The words stabbed my eardrums.
“She wants your original thoughts, honey.”
I did what any well-meaning, writing-workshop-trained mother would do. I told her to write what she knows.
“If you want to go with a thriller or suspense angle, why don’t you write about a girl who goes out for a run and doesn’t come back?” I offered.
She went upstairs and got to work, or so I thought.
When she came down for dinner and recounted the story she claimed to have finished (um, that was fast), it sounded uncomfortably close to the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping.
“Did you use ChatGPT to help you write it?” I asked.
“Just the first line.”
Just the first line. As if the chatbot had politely handed over the pen after one sentence and wished her well. As if anyone, in the history of cheating, has ever stopped at one line.
There were other inconsistencies in her explanation of the assignment and its due dates that suggested I wasn’t getting the truth, so I went through her devices.
To my surprise, ChatGPT had been downloaded on both her phone and her iPad. On the iPad, the chat history was empty. What happened to that first line?
“Why is there no history?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I don’t know!”
I called baloney.
I went downstairs and picked up her phone. There it was, more than once, in the plain, unbothered syntax of a kid who thought no one would ever look: do my math homework.
Not explain this problem. Not help me understand. Do it. She had been photographing her assignments, feeding them to the app, and copying down what came back. Voilà. Homework done.
The deal we made in July
When I asked her why, she said she was stressed. Too much work, not enough time.
I believe she feels that way. I also know what the screen-time report said.
Over the summer, she negotiated, quite skillfully, for a phone with no downtime and no app limits. I agreed on the condition that I could trust her and that I could see her work getting done. It was a reasonable deal. I was proud of her for making the case.
A quick look at her daily usage told me where the stress was coming from. Hours on Instagram. Hours on YouTube. Far more time than we ever see her spend on homework. The homework wasn’t the problem. The scroll was eating the hours she should have spent doing the work.
Unfortunately for her, I am not a clueless parent. I work in cybersecurity. I know how to set up parental controls, how to read a usage report, how to spot an app that shouldn’t be there. And I’m willing to take the abuse that comes with using that knowledge: the eye rolls, the you’re so controlling, the none of my friends’ parents do this, the I have literally zero privacy in this house.
It is exhausting to be the firewall. It is exhausting to be the person who has to assume the worst so that you’re occasionally surprised by the best. It’s exhausting to have every boundary relitigated as a human rights violation by someone who still can’t find her other shoe. And if it’s this hard for a parent who knows exactly what to look for, I can’t imagine what it’s like for the parents who don’t.
“But it was just Google”
She lost her phone for cheating and lying.
Two weeks later, she was working on the final draft of the short story, and she asked me to proofread it. For the most part, it sounded like my daughter, and it was good: age-appropriate syntax and description. Except for one sentence that was just a little too vivid.
“Are these your words?” I asked.
She looked at me, knowing there would be consequences if she lied.
“Kinda,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“I searched Google for a better way to describe the trees.”
“That’s cheating. That’s using AI,” I said.
“No, it’s not!” she said, so defensively that I believed she meant it.
When I raised an eyebrow, she was genuinely baffled. That wasn’t cheating. That wasn’t AI. It was just Google.
Except it isn’t just Google anymore. Type a question into Google today, and the first thing you see isn’t a list of links. It’s an AI Overview, a machine-written answer sitting on top of the results, ready to be copied. My daughter asked a search engine for help with a sentence, and a language model wrote it for her.
This week, Google made that blurred line official policy for schools. On November 3, the company announced that its AI tools (Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Gemini in Classroom), along with Google Search itself, will be off by default for K-12 student accounts until administrators turn them on. That sounds like a win for parents until you read the fine print: schools cannot turn Search back on without its AI features. A school’s options are Search with AI Overviews and AI chat, Search with a tutoring-style mode Google calls Guided Learning, or no Google Search at all. The changes roll out in early 2027.
Google’s education chief, Chris Phillips, explained the decision by suggesting that Search and AI are deeply integrated. Los Angeles and New York City schools, which have temporarily banned generative AI in elementary and middle schools, had asked for search without the AI summaries. They didn’t get it.
The backlash was immediate. Former FTC chair Lina Khan accused Google of using its search monopoly to coerce schools into adopting AI. Josh Golin of the children’s advocacy group Fairplay called it an attempt to “strong-arm schools into using its AI products.” And this battle isn’t new. Back in July, Common Sense Media rated Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode an unacceptable risk for students.
So whose job is this?
I keep asking who is supposed to teach kids how to use this stuff. Parents? Teachers? The companies building it? The answer is all three, but we are not carrying equal weight.
Parents own the home front, and I’m not trying to wriggle out of that. I set the rules, I check the devices, I suffer the slammed doors. But I’m up against products engineered by thousands of very smart people whose job is to keep my kid scrolling and make the answer appear before the question is finished.
Teachers own the classroom, and I spent enough years in one to know what they’re already carrying. They’re now expected to redesign every assignment to be AI-proof, police tools they didn’t choose, and teach the difference between research and outsourcing to kids who can’t see the line, often without a district policy to back them up.
Ed-tech vendors own the defaults. A 15-year-old will not dig into her settings to turn off an AI Overview. She will use what’s in front of her. When Google decides that search and AI are inseparable, it isn’t describing a technical fact. It’s making a product choice and then handing the consequences to schools and parents to clean up.
My daughter didn’t think asking Google for better tree descriptions was cheating, and despite my efforts to explain it to her, I understand why she’s confused. For her entire life, Google has been the place you go to find things. Now it’s the place that does things for you. If the tool blurs the line by design, it’s misguided to blame the kid for not seeing it.
None of that excuses the fact that my daughter lied. She chose Instagram over algebra. But as a former colleague of mine said back in 2014, “I’m never going to be as interesting as the internet.” So who’s to blame if we end up in a slow-motion Idiocracy, a generation that can produce an answer to anything and explain almost nothing?
I put the biggest share of the blame on the people who have the most power and the least to lose. Parents can set limits. Teachers can redesign lessons. Only the companies can decide whether the shortcut is the default.
In the meantime, my daughter has her phone back, but with both downtime and app limits. ChatGPT is gone, though I know that trying to get rid of these apps is a game of whack-a-mole. So we talk a lot about character and integrity, and about the reality that when you present yourself as someone other than who you really are, it catches up with you. If you want to be respected as someone who works hard and does well, you actually have to do the work. Sure, there are tools that make tasks more efficient, but they aren’t substitutes for learning. So I’m teaching my daughter the difference between getting help and getting a chatbot to do the work for you.