ChatGPT helps Hong Kong students with critical thinking, but teachers stay ahead with human touch
- Kowloon school’s head start using AI in classrooms lets its students see pros and cons of tech tool
- Integrating AI in language and history lessons makes for livelier discussions, better prep for exams
Hong Kong teacher Joanne Ho Kit-ying was full of anticipation as she handed her Form Five Chinese-language students tablet computers equipped with ChatGPT, the controversial yet powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
The class had to analyse a short story, A Woman Like Me, by the late Chinese author Xi Xi, about a mortuary make-up artist preparing to reveal her profession to her new boyfriend at a cafe.
Ho wanted the students to ask ChatGPT how it thought the boyfriend would react.
“My goal is to encourage my students to use their critical thinking and creativity to evaluate and interpret the AI-generated responses,” said Ho, who has been teaching Chinese for 13 years.
Her school, Yu Chun Keung Memorial College in Kowloon, was ahead of others when it started using ChatGPT in classes for non-science subjects in January, just two months after it was unveiled by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
The language processing program is able to speedily sieve through vast quantities of digital information to provide humanlike answers to questions, generate essays or papers depending on what it is asked to do.