AI should be asking your kids more questions

ChatGPT and its peers have become the bane of teachers.

- Parmy Olson

A Fuchun Secondary School student in Singapore using ChatGPT in an English language class. Estonia is pioneering a better way of using ChatGPT to learn -- by making it harder and retraining the model to pose more questions than answers. ST FILE PHOTO

Students churn out homework assignments with it and, according to one exasperated professor, secretly feed themselves smart comments for class discussions. Far from helping kids think for themselves, today’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools offer an irresistible cognitive shortcut they'll likely depend on through their adult lives and careers. RIP critical thinking.

So Estonia is pioneering a better way of using ChatGPT to learn - by making it harder and retraining the model to pose more questions than answers. The effort challenges ChatGPT’s core appeal and could get the cold shoulder from OpenAI, but it could also unlock Al’s true potential in education in a way no one else has managed.

Estonia has long been a technology pioneer. A 1990s effort to digitalise all government services turned it into one of the most digitally sophisticated countries.

In January, it’ll also become the first to give all schools access to ChatGPT Edu, a version of the popular chatbot developed for universities. OpenAl has mostly given it stronger privacy protections, but Estonian scientists also want to modify the model in the coming months to make it a better teacher.

Fine-tuning changes an AI model's behaviour. Engineers retrain an existing model on new data — in this case, conversations with students — and give it new instructions to alter how it responds, so it prompts the user to think instead of giving a polished answer. That, however, can make it feel less helpful by ChatGPT’s usual standards.