This is a huge mess of an article. They talk about how student data should not be given out to corporations who profit from this data, parents not believing the government when they say that all data is kept on Canadian servers, concerns about Google’s role in providing Chromebooks to students, mentioning the existence of collaborative projects between Mila (original developers of this risk analysis project) and Google, criticisms of generative AI in art, and a bunch of other stuff. Most importantly, they don’t say anything about how any of this is supposed to be related to each other. So I get the impression that the conclusion they want the reader to draw from this is that the Quebec government is giving out student data to OpenAI or Google to process for them, but they can’t outright say that because there’s no evidence to support it.

And then what? At the end of the day, unless you’re running the experiments yourself, you’re still putting your trust in another group of experts. Either you trust that they really did what they said they did and saw what they said they saw, or you trust another group to draw the correct conclusions from a collection of studies and what they know about the topic.

The unfortunate reality is that most people don’t have the skills required to critically read scientific literature.