A recent study, titled Generative AI, education and copyright – A Nordic joint survey, shows that an average of 62% of teachers in Finland, from pre-school to university, have at least some knowledge of AI tools. The higher the level of education, the wider the awareness of AI.
“Finland needs to wake up to the expanding use of AI in education and ensure that copyright is protected also in the era of AI. This is an important message to both policymakers and education providers. The survey shows that the Nordic countries are on the threshold of a new era of education,” says Kirsi Salmela, Director of Legal Affairs and Research at Kopiosto.
Today, around 8% of teachers in Finland already use AI tools daily or a few times a week to produce different types of content for teaching, such as text or images. On the other hand, a large proportion of teachers, around 42%, have never used AI tools to produce such content.
Six per cent of teachers in Finland use AI to produce videos and music at least a few times a month. In the other Nordic countries, this percentage is only half as high.
The responses to open-ended questions indicated that AI could be used more, but there are concerns about the ethical aspects and climate impacts of AI.
Even so, the majority of teachers in Finland, around 58%, believe they will be using AI more in a year’s time than they do now. Only a marginal group, around 2% of respondents, believe they will use AI tools less in the future.
One third of teachers believe AI will replace conventional teaching materials
The belief that at least half of the published material will be replaced by AI-generated material in the future is shared by 30% of teachers in Finland. In the other Nordic countries, teachers think this is slightly more likely. However, only a very small proportion of respondents believe that published material would ever be completely replaced by AI-generated material.
The report highlights the phenomenon of feeding published teaching materials into AI tools. According to the survey, 15–33% of teachers in Finland had uploaded material created by others to an AI tool in the past month, depending on the level of education they worked at. Around half of respondents had never fed published material into AI tools.
Teachers in Finland overwhelmingly believe that creative professionals should be compensated for the use of their work to train AI. This was the view of around 68% of teachers in Finland, compared to around 61% of teachers in the other Nordic countries. Only around 9% of teachers in Finland thought that no compensation should be paid to creators.
Many teachers sceptical about the impact of AI on learners
In Finland, teachers rate the use of AI by learners as slightly lower than in Norway and Denmark. More than half of primary or lower secondary school teachers in Finland, or 53%, estimate that no students regularly use AI for learning purposes. In Norway, this percentage is 41%. The gap narrows in upper secondary education, but learners in Finland were still estimated to use AI less than in other Nordic countries.
As many as 43% of teachers in Finland believe that AI will have a negative impact on the education of students in the future. Just under 18% see the impact as positive. Less than a third consider the impact to be neutral.
The survey was carried out in March 2025. The survey was sent to teachers in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The total number of respondents from Finland was 517 and from the other Nordic countries 2,023. The responses are weighted by country to reflect the population of those countries. The survey was carried out by Kantar, and the data collection in Finland was carried out by Norstat.