New Yorker: Google's Gemini Lands in Sixth-Grade Essays

Jessica Winter's sixth-grade daughter opens her new Google Chromebook to write an essay. The first thing she sees is a prompt that reads "Help me write."

Winter builds her New Yorker piece around that moment. The Chromebook arrived with an all-ages version of Gemini pre-installed. The AI is not something her daughter had to seek out. It is the writing environment itself.

Winter maps where else AI has landed in K-8. In Boston, sixth graders use ChatGPT and Claude to prep for standardized tests. In kindergarten classrooms in New York and Los Angeles, a reading bot called Amira records children's voices. In at least one art class, Adobe Express generated "highly sexualized images" for students. Winter writes that the pitch tech companies make to schools, that AI will equalize rich and poor and free teachers for more meaningful work, has recurred in every wave of ed-tech marketing. Of those claims she says "the feasibility of such a scenario is yet to be established."

A 2025 MIT study she cites warns that "the integration of LLMs into learning environments may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy." A separate analysis Winter references found that roughly one in five student interactions with generative AI "involved cheating, self-harm, bullying, and other problematic behaviors."

Two AI researchers on our radar shared the piece to their feeds this week. The essay reads as a parent's documentation of a done deal: Winter is raising her kids to be skeptical of AI, and the tools arrive anyway, bundled with the device the school hands them.