For decades, Walla Walla High School in the wheat basket of Washington state has maintained an old red wooden barn on campus where students learn a venerable farming skill: how to raise pigs and sheep.

Now, as the new academic year starts, some teachers at the school are preparing to help students learn the latest digital skill: how to navigate artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT.

In August, Walla Walla Public Schools, which serves some 5,500 students, held a day-long workshop on AI chatbots, which can generate homework essays, fictional stories and other texts. About 100 local educators showed up at the high school for the event.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a district that had blocked student access to ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI of San Francisco, on school devices only in February.

“I do want students to learn to use it,” said Ms Yazmin Bahena, a dual-language middle school social studies teacher. “They are going to grow up in a world where this is the norm.”

The media furore over chatbots last winter upended school districts and universities across the United States. The tools, which are trained on vast databases of digital texts, use AI to manufacture written responses to user prompts. The bots also liberally make stuff up.

Tech giants and billionaires promised that the AI tools would revolutionse learning. Critics warned the bots would be more likely to undermine education, inundating students with misinformation and facilitating widespread cheating.

Amid the forecasts of imminent marvels and doom, some public schools tried to hit the pause button to give administrators time to catch up.

Last December, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the US’ second-largest school system, blocked ChatGPT on school Wi-Fi and district-owned student devices. Other districts soon followed, including New York City, the largest US school system.

But administrators quickly realised the bot bans were ineffective. For one thing, wealthier students who owned smartphones or laptops could simply use ChatGPT or similar bots like Google’s Bard at home.

“Children who have devices and unfiltered, unfettered connectivity at home are already benefiting from access to these tools,” Mr Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an interview this week. “Students who depend on district devices and connectivity are restricted.”

In May, New York City schools issued a public mea culpa, saying the district had acted too hastily and would unblock ChatGPT. This week, Mr Carvalho said Los Angeles schools were also working on a more permissive policy.

As schools reopen for autumn, educators and district leaders are wrestling with complex questions posed by the AI tools: What should writing assignments look like in an era when students can simply employ chatbots to generate prose for them? How can schools, teachers and students use the bots effectively and creatively? Does it still count as cheating if a student asks a bot to fabricate a rough draft that they then rewrite themselves?

Administrators say they are simply taking a pragmatic view: Students will need to learn how to prompt chatbots to answer their questions, just as they learn to query search engines like Google.

“The world our kids are inheriting is going to be full of AI, and we need to make sure they are well equipped for it, both the benefits and the drawbacks,” Mr Wade Smith, the superintendent of Walla Walla Public Schools, said in a recent interview.

Walla Walla offers a portrait of one district’s remarkable learning curve on AI in 2023. School administrators sought to take advantage of the chatbots’ potential benefits while working to tackle thorny issues like cheating, misinformation and potential risks to student privacy.

In January, Mr Keith Ross, the school district’s director of technology and information services, began hearing about ChatGPT. District teachers were starting to notice a few students submitting chatbot-produced homework as their own.

One obvious tip-off: The chatbots fabricated quotes that were not in the novels assigned in class.

“We just didn’t know enough about the technology,” said Mr Ross, who blocked students’ access to ChatGPT in February. “We blocked it to buy us some time to get up to speed on what it is and how we were going to support teachers, and potentially students, using it.”

The district set up an AI advisory committee with 15 administrators and teachers.

“There’s two main categories: using it to be more efficient and save time as a teacher,” said Ms Carrie LaRoy, the district’s technology integration specialist, who helps oversee the committee, “but then also how to teach our students to use it responsibly and with fidelity.”

But even enthusiastic Walla Walla teachers said they were concerned students might have difficulty being sufficiently critical of the materials manufactured by chatbots.

“I’m worried that they might come to take it at face value,” said Ms Shauna Millett, an English teacher at the high school.

For now, the district is encouraging teachers to embrace the chatbots, including schooling students on their apparent flaws. Students 13 or older may also create ChatGPT accounts if they wish. NYTIMES