An entire country just gave all of its 10th and 11th graders their own ChatGPT accounts to use for school.
No one knows how the experiment will turn out.
This Baltic nation of 1.3 million people saw early in the artificial-intelligence revolution that most of its high-school students were offloading schoolwork to chatbots. Rather than ban the new technology, Estonia mounted a high-stakes and seemingly paradoxical intervention, distributing free chatbots to nearly 20,000 students earlier this year and rethinking pedagogical methods.
The question Estonia is grappling with is a universal one for academic institutions and workplaces alike: In the AI era, how much thinking should humans do, and how do we keep the new technology from becoming a crutch?