His students suddenly started getting A’s. Did a Google AI tool go too far?
Carolyn Jones
November 10, 2025
In summary
Some teachers say that AI tools, particularly Google Lens, have made it impossible to enforce academic integrity in the classroom — with potentially harmful long-term effects on students’ learning.
A few months ago, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles Unified noticed something different about his students’ tests. Students who had struggled all semester were suddenly getting A’s. He suspected some were cheating, but he couldn’t figure out how.
Until a student showed him the latest version of Google Lens.
Google had recently made the visual search tool easier to use on the company’s Chrome browser. When users click on an icon hidden in the tool bar, a moveable bubble pops up. Wherever the bubble is placed, a sidebar appears with an artificial intelligence answer, description, explanation or interpretation of whatever is inside the bubble. For students, it provides an easy way to cheat on digital tests without typing in a prompt or even leaving the page. All they have to do is click.
