Be careful what you ask for, because you might really get it.

Google sparked intense debate this week: The company announced that schools that refuse to adopt AI will lose the permission to use its ubiquitous search engine.

This internet giant plans to default to disabling students' AI service starting next year in response to pressure from some schools that wish to have more control over this technology.

But there's a problem here: Google Search itself is a kind of AI product, to the core. Schools don't want AI, so they also can't use search functions.

This news immediately attracted criticism towards Google and also sparked lively discussions within Business Insider, including among myself.

This incident raises a larger question, especially after the mid-term elections, which revealed the extent of the AI rebound: what exactly do people mean when they say they don't want AI?

This distinction is very important, because AI has already been woven into many of the things we use and enjoy every day.

And what about Google Search? For at least the past decade, it has been driven by AI.

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If you really want to ban AI, you may have to give up some of your favorite experiences. Yes, all the data centers that power this technology are also part of this transaction.

Why do we care about this?

I understand why people have such strong feelings about this. The globally leading AI company Anthropic warns that AI will either leave us unemployed or kill us. Meanwhile, we have to pay more for electricity, while data centers continue to buzz annoyingly in the background.

The dispute between Google and schools is particularly thorny, especially for journalists and educators.

The fundamental task of journalism is to find and verify facts. Journalists seek out original documents, interview those with firsthand information, and question competing accounts. We strive to produce a reliable first draft of history.

Education also has a similar mission: to teach young people to seek credible information from direct sources, to evaluate these sources, and to make informed decisions.

Generative AI threats can undermine this process.

Traditional Google searches would usually direct people to websites, allowing them to verify the information on their own. With Google's updated AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT, it is now more and more common for the search results to directly summarize this information and provide answers.

This is very convenient, often even extremely convenient. However, it also adds an extra layer between the students and the original evidence.

A colleague with the ID Business Insider believes that there is a fundamental difference between providing you with the technology to help you find reliable sources online and having a chatbot that simply hands you the answers directly. He is right.

Those students who never learn to investigate their sources may grow up to be adults who cannot distinguish between facts and fiction.

Can Google make time go backwards?

However, there is one uncomfortable fact: this new way of searching for information online will not disappear.

There is an important difference between AI and the generative AI. The latter is a more advanced technology that generates answers, which is what is known as the AI answer engine.

For over a decade, Google has been using AI to understand searches and to rank websites and other digital information. For example, RankBrain technology was introduced in 2015. BERT is Google's large language model, which adopts the Transformer architecture that is now at the core of the AI revolution, and began to support searches at the end of 2019.

Generative AI goes a step further by using similar technologies to generate summaries, thereby reducing the need to access the original sources.

Today, Google can provide schools with a reduced version of its search function that does not contain AI Overviews or AI Mode, while still retaining the older AI technology that helps to organize search results.

The CEO of Graphite, who helps companies grow through search engines and AI, told me that technically, it is feasible.

“I think they just don’t want to do it because it’s not worth the effort,” he said.

Smith believes that the demand for a search experience without the generative AI function will be very small. People may complain about AI, but that doesn't mean they will sacrifice convenience in order to avoid AI.

"People say they don't like AI, but in fact they do, especially when they don't know that it's actually AI," he told me.

Attention remains the key.

Google continues to drive Search in a more generative direction for a strong commercial reason: ChatGPT is challenging its search business.

As my colleague Katie Notopoulos reported this week, a OpenAI executive recently stated that the number of similar search requests being processed by ChatGPT currently amounts to about 20% of Google's search volume.

This doesn't equate to holding 20% of the search market, but it's enough to astonishingly demonstrate how quickly consumer habits are changing.

Many people prefer to ask questions to ChatGPT and get useful answers, rather than being overwhelmed by a long list of web links.

Google cannot allow OpenAI to snatch away this portion of attention, especially among the younger population who are in the process of forming lifelong habits. Google's search revenue in the third quarter fell significantly short of expectations, which further increases the pressure to drive evolution.

The real question is how children should learn.

In the field of education, Google's solution is to allow Search to continue along this clear AI path, but at the same time give schools more control and change the way they AI answer students' questions.

This is somewhat similar to Study Mode which was launched by OpenAI last year. The latter aims to make ChatGPT more like a patient mentor, rather than a machine that directly provides answers to assignments.

Whether these practices can truly improve learning remains an unsolved question. However, merely declaring a classroom to be "de-AIed" is not a solution.

The goal of education is not to accumulate facts, but to learn how to think, investigate, ask questions, and to continue growing throughout one's life.

AI can help achieve this, but it may also undermine it. The challenge lies in teaching children to distinguish between the two.

Before we ask for a world without AI, we should first ask ourselves a simple question: How much of the technology we use are we really willing to give up?