Finland is preparing for uncertain times ahead. To the east, it is boosting defenses along its 830-mile-long border with Russia, the longest in the NATO alliance. In the north, its soldiers are teaching other Western troops to fight in Arctic conditions.
And in its schools, young Finns are learning to defend another front line: reality itself.
Educators around the world are scrambling to prepare students for life in the A.I. age, in which deepfake videos — those made or manipulated with artificial intelligence and often designed to deceive — are so good that even global experts struggle to tell what’s real.
Finland may have a big head start. Finns rank among the world’s most media-literate people, in part because educators in the Nordic country of close to six million already teach students how to spot fake news. It’s all part of an effort to teach Finns to think critically, in hopes of strengthening Finland’s democracy and protecting the country from misinformation.
But A.I. may test even the Finnish system.
“We’ve been learning about deepfakes even before the A.I. boom,” said Olli Malankin, a 20-year-old graduating senior at the Helsinki Upper Secondary School of Media Arts, in the Finnish capital, who had just come from a social studies class focused on the dangers of trusting A.I. “That’s getting all the more harder since A.I. is getting better all the time.”
A giraffe playing soccer
Finnish teachers have long taught students to separate fiction from reality even before they have lost all their baby teeth. Efforts to promote media literacy started in the 1950s during the Cold War.
