Machine learning: could ChatGPT become just another tool for Australia’s year 12 – like Wikipedia?

Trinity Meachem is a year 12 International Baccalaureate high school student at Wesley College in Melbourne. She and her peers have been using ChatGPT to generate ideas for assignments. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

As ChatGPT hit headlines last summer, schools and education providers began panicking about how to handle the emerging artificial intelligence platform.

Some Australian states and territories temporarily banned the technology amid plagiarism concerns. But International Baccalaureate – which offers education programs around the world – took a different approach.