Hong Kong universities relent to rise of ChatGPT, AI tools for teaching and assignments, but keep eye out for plagiarism
- Breakneck pace of AI development prompts most universities to adopt ChatGPT and other tools
- Academics revamp teaching, while students who do not acknowledge AI help with assignments will face penalties
Ashley Lam Cheuk-yiu, a second-year marketing student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), had an assignment to design an advertising campaign for a brand using concepts taught in class.
The 20-year-old wrote a 600-word essay that proposed tech giant Apple should use its famous “Think Different” slogan to promote human rights and gender equality as well as its iPhone products.
Then she asked ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool that emerged last year, to do the same assignment.
Almost instantly, it produced a coherent proposal for a campaign and titled it “Efficiency Unleashed: Experience the Future with iPhone”.
“I think AI did a better job than me in naming the campaign,” she said. “But some of its paragraphs were too repetitive and less creative.”
The speed of AI development has led to most of Hong Kong’s universities adopting the generative tools in the new school year.
