Brent Warner 0:00
AI bots are slipping into browsers and finishing work in Canvas for students with the click of a button. What do teachers need to know? This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Seven, Episode Five.

Tim Van Norman 0:13
Welcome to HigherEdTech podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:36
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology in the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:44
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us.

Brent Warner 0:47
All right, so Tim, one of the headers is, we both enjoy integrating technology in the classroom, which is what this is all about. But today we’re kind of talking about, you know, some technology we don’t really enjoy integrating into the classroom, and we don’t really have much choice over the matter either.

Tim Van Norman 1:03
Well, we’re, we’re interested in integrating it the right way. Yeah. The problem is, what we’re going to talk about today, unfortunately, is the other side. Yeah.

Brent Warner 1:13
Okay, so let’s just jump into it. Absolutely. I think the the conversation here, and this has been coming up a bit, you know, the conversation around agents, you know, AI bots that can kind of do whatever, whatever you want it to do. Just kind of tell it what to do. It’s kind of, it’s been on the periphery. We’ve talked about it quite a bit over the last couple of years, just kind of as a concept. But now it’s kind of coming into much more play. And in particular, it’s popping up in browsers, like every major browser is putting in AI as an option right there with the click of a click of a button. And so this is creating a new set of issues that a lot of teachers are going to be struggling with.

Tim Van Norman 1:59
Oh, absolutely. And I love the fact that while chrome went ahead and created this homework helper, they also then turned it off. It’s not available. I love how they did that. And you know, Washington Post has an article that teachers got mad about a cheat button in Chrome, and so they turned it off. I love

Brent Warner 2:19
that, sure. Except, except they did not turn it off at all. They just kind of hit it. So Tim, you and I were talking about this little bit earlier, and so this article from Washington Post is quite great, and it almost feels like when you read it, you’re like, Okay, good. Like Google did the right thing because they they turned it off. Basically what happened was they had a button that would show up in your Chrome browser, and whenever you showed up on a test page or on a homework page, it would recognize that, and a little button would show up and say homework helper, and you could click on it, and then you could ask it questions, but it has no pedagogical, you know, accuracy, right? It’s not actually trained to help students, because, it’s because one of the questions, in fact, the first suggested question you can ask is, help me solve this problem. And it does not help in quote marks, right? It just solves the problem for you. And it goes, it goes through all the steps, I guess. But like, it’s not doing anything that’s like, pedagogically sound, a Socratic method, walking you through it, refusing to answer, right? It’s just straight up giving you the answers. And I tried it out, and here’s the problem with it, is so Google said they got rid of it. And then when I logged into Canvas, I was like, Okay, it’s not there. But then as soon as I logged into a course inside of Canvas, so not the Canvas dashboard, but in the course, then Bing, the the button popped up again. And so there I was going, Oh, nothing is actually missing here.

Tim Van Norman 4:00
And that’s it’s something that we’ve in the past, we’ve said it can’t do it yet. Mm, hmm, well, now it can do it now.

Brent Warner 4:09
Yeah. And so, just to be very clear on this, what, basically, what it does is it brings up. So the way to access this, because I think every teacher listening to this should give it a try. The way to access this is even if it’s, you know, quote, unquote, hidden when you click on your Omni Bar, which is where you know your address bar up at the top of the Google Chrome browser. If you click on that, you’ll see a little drop down menu and Tim, you’re used to these as like, you know, hey, suggestions for similar types of searches, or whatever else it is, but now they have a little camera ion, and it says, Ask Google about this page, which is what they call Google lens, right? And so then when you click on that, it will open up a sidebar on the right hand side of your browser, and that’s when you can start. Kind of interacting with it. Now, Tim, I showed you a couple of examples. I sent you a couple of screenshots. What did you see? Were your impressions? Wow.

Tim Van Norman 5:12
Now, and, and, I mean, for for people who are listening, if you’re if you’ve got a personal Chrome account, you can go up and click on the little Gemini button in the upper right hand corner as well, and it’ll do the same thing that we’re talking about. It will just use Gemini to read the page and give you suggestions, and you can ask it questions, and basically, unless you can see what the student is actually doing on their computer. Yeah, Gemini can do their homework without a problem.

Brent Warner 5:48
100% Yeah. And so that. So I sent you a couple pictures, right? One picture I sent you from a Canvas course, a fake Canvas course that I created, and then the other one, though, I also sent you one that was a, just a PDF, right? So there was just a link to on PDF, and I said, Hey, answer, answer, all the questions on the PDF, right? And it totally went through the PDF and just gave me all the answers right there on the side. And so it was like everything was already answered for me. Now it’s just a question of, where am I going to put those answers

Tim Van Norman 6:22
well and and understand we’ve just said that this is in a browser. Your browser can open PDFs Absolutely. So it’s not like, Oh, I’m protected because they it’s a PDF, and so they have to open it in, we’re in, you know, Adobe or something. No, your browsers can open PDF.

Brent Warner 6:42
Yeah, so there’s not a lot like if you can see it. I don’t know what videos yet. I haven’t tried video stuff, although I’ve heard there are some access to some video features, but, but basically, if your browser can see it, now, the AI can scan it, see everything, do everything, and you know, nobody else will be any of the wiser.

Tim Van Norman 7:04
So, and we have seen other applications that do read basically MP fours. They do read out of YouTube or whatever, and can create a slide deck for you from it so, so we know it can happen. That’s not the issue. Just, will this one do it as readily as the others?

Brent Warner 7:28
That’s right. And so Tim, one of the things we want to talk about here, because the first thing that I asked you is, well, we have institutional accounts. Right when I log into Chrome with my IVC account, you know the I get the notifications. Hey, this is run by, you know, your district, right? And, and you have to, you know, check with an admin or whatever else it says, right? But my first question to you was, well, can we turn this off on the back end? And I know that people are going to want

Tim Van Norman 7:55
to know, absolutely you can. It’s a great idea. Now, let me tell you why. It doesn’t make any difference. Okay, Brent, every semester you have a problem when you use Google assignments. We’ve talked about this several times on the show, and that the students at the beginning of the semester, some of the students, will use their personal Google accounts. Well, if they do that. Guess what? They have just circumvented our ability to block that. Yeah. So basically, and, I mean, I do the same thing on my personal laptop. I have my personal Google account up, and I’m I use that, and, oh, I need to hop into Canvas to look at something really quick. I’ll hop into Canvas on that. I don’t log out, log into my district account, and then, you know, in Google, and then go into Canvas, I just keep on going. And so based on that alone, US locking it down and making absolutely sure it’s not in in our browsers and in our account won’t do a thing,

Brent Warner 9:00
yeah, unless we had some sort of system that really, like, well, and really it would be Google or canvas or whoever that would have to build this, which is, you cannot access this at all unless you’re logged in with a verified institutional account, right? But they don’t do those things because, of course, they want you using Google or whatever else it is, you know, outside, like in your own life, right? Which does make sense. But the problem is, of course, all of this stuff so, so it’s tricky, because one part, you could click a button, it’s so convenient just to click the button and figure it out right inside of here, right? And so you would create a little bit of friction if you had a way to block them from using, you know, whatever page, or using the browser without their, you know, school account or something like that. But at the end of the day, it’s just one. It’s just creating one more step that’s still significantly easier for many students than it might be just to say. Hey, I’m, you know, then doing the work so, so and again, I do want to be careful. Tim, every time we talk about this stuff, I don’t want to make assumptions that all students are cheating, or any of these things. But what we’re what we are talking about, though, is a outside organizations creating such a smooth and fluid way to get work done that it almost feels foolish not to use it right. Like, there, there’s kind of an anti, like, an anti incentive to do the work, because it’s just, like, just get it done and go have your fun, right? And so I, I don’t know. I know a lot of us, even those of us who are pro AI, in a lot of ways, are really struggling with this type of stuff, absolutely. So that’s going to lead us to part two, which is so we talked about Chrome, and now we’re going to talk a little bit about perplexity. So Tim, have you looked at perplexity browser at all?

Tim Van Norman 10:57
Unfortunately, I have not had a chance to yet, but some of the stuff you were telling me and showing me, oh yeah, that’s almost more scary than Chrome.

Brent Warner 11:07
Yeah, so and i this will not be long behind in Chrome, because it’s Google. You know, they’re they’re gonna get the same things. But perplexity has more of an automated agent that will go in and click around on the pages and do the work for you. So it’s not just a question of, hey, give me the answers. It’s a question of, just go in and do the work, right, like so. So I created a separate account for a separate Instructure account, and I opened up some of the quizzes that I’ve had, you know, in years past. And I put them in there, and then I said, I said to perplexity browser. So I got the comment browser, I downloaded it, and then I said, Hey, because I only had the teacher’s account, I didn’t, I don’t have a student’s account for that one, so I just did a teacher’s account. And I said, Okay, move into student view and then complete these quizzes, right? And so it actually went through the process, and it’s like, oh, and it’ll walk you through. It’ll actually talk to you and say, like, Hey, this is what’s going on, right? And said, Okay, recognizing that you need to go into student view. Okay, switching into student view. Now we’re answering questions one, two and three. Okay. Now I see that there are several questions that are the same style, different types of answers inside of here, but let me batch answer them all right now, boom, right. Got all of those done. Then it did multiple did multiple choice, no problem. It had like, short answer questions inside of there that it did, no problem. And then it submitted the it and turned it all in, and I literally didn’t have to touch it for a second, except that my login into Canvas, right? That was it. And so I logged in, and then I said, just go ahead and do the work. And it did not give me any resistance, saying, hey, like, are you sure that you want to do? Like, just have it do the work for you. It’s just like, yeah, we’ll just do the whole thing, walk through step by step by step. And then Tim, I tried a different version, which is I tried a discussion post, and it completely did the discussion post too. And it was like, you know, find a song that you like, you know, find a song that you like. Talk about, you know, emotional intelligence, how it relates to the song in some, some way or another. Find the YouTube link to it, right? They were all these little tricks to like, ensure that students are actually doing the work. And it’s like, oh, okay, here. Like Adele, you know, someone like you. This is the song that I really like. And then, and then, because I didn’t really prompt it very well, and it was the only one in there, it went and answered this. The it did a reply to the prompt to itself and gave more feedback to itself. So it’s just like, oh my god, it’s it’s going through, and it’s doing all the work, and really, a student could pretty much get almost everything done without ever having even looked at the assignment.

Tim Van Norman 13:58
Yep. So that’s scary.

Brent Warner 14:03
Yeah, there’s a couple other teachers out there who are kind of talking about this stuff. Another, you know, a professor named Darcy Norman, you know, put on same thing. 100, 100% of the quiz questions were answered correctly. All these kinds of things. And so I think what we’re talking about here today, Tim is a little bit of like, I don’t know that we have answers, but we have, well, I know that we don’t have answers, I guess I should rephrase that, but, but we do kind of want to talk about this, right? We want everybody to be aware of it and to test it for themselves and figure out what they’re going to do. Because this is a lot. This is a lot to deal with.

Tim Van Norman 14:45
And notice we’re not talking about you paid for all these accounts or anything like that, either. Yeah, Oh, totally. Didn’t go out and buy them. Everything was free. So it it’s just a reminder. That, unfortunately, at a certain point you might have to get to be intrusive on your students work. And what I’m talking about are things like lockdown browsers and proctoring tools that do screen recording and stuff like that. You know, nobody likes to be watching somebody else do their work. But guess what? In this case, the only way you would know that it happened is if you saw that it happened well, and not only, Canvas isn’t going to record it.

Brent Warner 15:32
Yeah, yeah. And so there’s a couple things. So one, because we were talking about this before, is like, how about a proctoring center, right? Like, if you have a testing center and you’re saying, Hey, we’ve got chrome up here, and that’s how you’re going in and doing the work, well, now Chrome, by default, has this activated inside of it, so even a student walks in and, you know, hey, put your phone in the basket. Or, you know what? I don’t know how the testing centers do those things, but, like, whatever they doing for security, and then it’s like, doesn’t matter, because the interface itself is the thing that’s going to be able to do this work, right? So that itself is its own set of problems. And so then if you’re doing Proctorio or whatever, which you know that I’ve had a lot of problems with those types of tools in the past, then it’s like you’re still going to have to spend the time to actually go and watch those and see, like, what’s going on in here. And so I don’t know how proactive these companies are being about, you know, fighting back or catching, you know, Proctorio probably should be right, being able to say, like, Hey, we’re automating or seeing that like AI tools were used in here. But like so many of these things are not, you know, Canvas is certainly not, as far as I know, they’re not really doing anything, although they were mentioned in The Washington Post article, right? They said something,

Tim Van Norman 16:52
yeah, that that they’re disappointed, and they’re hoping that they’re trying to work with people to have it not happen. But, you know, all it takes is somebody agreeing to it or not agreeing and just doing it themselves anyway. We’re not in a world where the laws matter that much. We just saw that Governor Newsom just recently signed into legislation another bill about protecting our privacy with AI and stuff, that’s great, but that doesn’t mean that all of the all of the people are going to follow. It’s just the ones that are big enough to lose money.

Brent Warner 17:32
Yeah, for sure. And then it’s like, and I mean, clearly right now, I hate to say it, because I’ve loved it so much in the past, but I do not feel like Google cares at all about education and about doing the right things by students and teachers and working through these things. They’re just like, No, we and in fact, in the article itself, the that one there, they straight up said something along the lines of, like, well, students want this, and so we’re giving to them. And it’s like, that was, that was the entirety of their response. The actual quote from their their spokesperson was, students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually. So we’re running tests offering an easier way to access lens, which Google lens while browsing. It’s like, so essentially, it’s like a big old, you know, Up yours, I guess, right? Like, we don’t care. We don’t care. And like that is, it’s just so disappointing, I guess. And we’ll, we’ll have to kind of keep working at this but, but here’s the thing, Tim, is we really want to know, I know that people who listen to this show are also proactive explorers and all those things. And so please help us out. Because right now, I think both of us are a little bit like, what do we do, right? But Tim, we did want to talk one more, one more part before we kind of wrap up here, which is, I really think it’s important that people test this out for themselves and see what it is and what it looks like. But I also think that, like, you know, people don’t just, if you’re like me, you’re like, Well, I don’t just want to give all my passwords and all my information over to one of these browsers. And so earlier this morning, when you were you and I were talking, we kind of talked through some ways to, like, say, well, what’s the safest possible way to do this? And so we kind of built a little, a little, a little system for a little bit of safety, just so that you can test these things out. So maybe you can walk us through some of those steps, absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 19:29
So one of the things that I suggest early in the process is create yourself a Google account, a Gmail account that is not tied to you. It’s not something you’re ever going to use for anything. Maybe it’s the the email account that you’re going to give out every time somebody that you don’t want to contact you requires you to give them an email to do something. Okay? So a piece of junk, right? But create one of those and have that ready, because when you have that and you’re ready to log in. With it and do stuff with it, you’re in a much better position to test things that you don’t want real information to go through. One of the other things that I had you do right away is to go onto your computer. You can do this on a personal computer. You can’t really do it on like one of our computers from the office, but create a separate login onto your computer that protects you so that you don’t accidentally have access to your files that you didn’t think they would have access to.

Brent Warner 20:32
So so a full second account, every computer has this right you click a button and on a Mac it like, flips the screen over and it’s like, Oh, you don’t want to be in your main account. What do you want to use your secondary account? Whatever it is like, my wife has her own login, right? Those types of things. So, yeah, so a totally second secondary account on your computer.

Tim Van Norman 20:53
So we’ve talked about two separate secondary accounts and and by the way, if you think this is overkill, think about what happens if, if you don’t do something like this, and now your data gets out in the wild, yeah, yeah. So these

Brent Warner 21:10
are just a couple steps. It’s not that hard.

Tim Van Norman 21:12
It takes you five minutes for both of them, yeah. Once you’ve done that, what I had to do is go to canvas.instructure.com, there you can get a you can sign up for a teacher, account for free and create your own course. You can be a student in another course. There’s all kinds of different things that you can do in that environment, and it’s all protected, but it’s it’s all there just one environment so you can create your own thing. So in your case, I suggested you take one of your old classes, export it out of Canvas and then import it into there. Does not contain any student material, so there’s nothing, no risk there. But you also didn’t have to go through and create each as each assignment individually, or quiz or anything like that. It’s just a fast way of getting the data in place. Yeah, yeah. And so once you’ve uploaded your course, you’re good to go. Yeah, you can have it. Start creating content in your course. You can have it. So that’s where the play comes in. You’ve created this environment now play with it, yeah, and see what it comes up with, yeah.

Brent Warner 22:25
And there are different ways, right? So you could do the faking like your student, and do a civic student view, view, like you said, Tim, you could also create a second, you know, like you could actually just log in as a student account, into your own, you know, have have your two accounts, create a student account, log in, test it out, see what it’s like. But also, I think, as a teacher, you could play around with things like, hey, you know, make a better design for me on this page, or log into, log into the HTML in here, and, you know, rearrange this so that it’s my school colors instead of the default, you know, colors that come in with, you know, I don’t know, whatever you might want to play with, right? So there are positive possible ways to use these things. But also it’s really eye opening to go, oh, it’s that easy just to get everything done. And I could literally walk away have a hot chocolate. And it can complete my entire course, or the vast majority of my entire course in a few minutes. And so that is a lot to a lot for us to wrap our heads.

Tim Van Norman 23:31
Unfortunately, it is it. We definitely suggest people go out and test it. Try it out. We’d love to know your thoughts. And we’ve given just a couple of of tools. Try it out with copilot. Try it out with, you know, you name it, try it out and just see what it can do. It’s an interesting thing that I wish we had better answers for how to control it. I agree.

Brent Warner 24:06
One small thing, this is going to be temporary, Tim, but I did, I did mention to you, I did have it do one assignment where Google assignment where you have to upload a file, and so it had to kind of create its own PDF and then upload it, and that was not an accessible file, like it was locked down, or it was kind of unclear on what it created. I couldn’t quite access it when I downloaded it, when it back in the teacher view. So, so maybe a little bit, if you’re having but again, it’s just a question of time, right? It’s not a, it’s not really a, a serious solution, but. But again, we need to be on top of where things are at the moment and then what things are going to look like in the future. So just to be aware of, yeah, ah, well, today’s not a happy one, but. But, you know, we hope it’s useful. We hope, we hope it’s thought provoking. Maybe it can open up some interesting conversations. With your students by they 100% already know about this stuff. It’s already out there. It’s on Tiktok and all the things that students are on so so it’s the best thing to do is to be aware so at least you can start developing some responses to what you think is the appropriate way to deal with this. Absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 25:23
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at thehigheredtechpodcast.com

Brent Warner 25:30
As always, we want your feedback, so please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts

Tim Van Norman 25:36
For everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by Library 213, or contact me. Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 25:52
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 25:58
I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 25:59
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.