The AI chat bot and digital image generation were both created by OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed AI company.

One student told the Post he would consider trying the tools out and another said he was already a regular user of ChatGPT and welcomed its introduction at HKU.

HKU said students could use AI for assignments unless specifically banned, but their monthly use of GenAI would be capped at 20 prompts per person across the two tools.

A spokesman said the cap was imposed to avoid the risk of students allowing outsiders access to the programs.

“The quota will also serve our teaching well. With quotas in students’ minds, they are likely to learn to think carefully before they throw a question at ChatGPT,” Pauline Chiu, HKU’s associate vice-president in teaching and learning and a chemistry professor, said.

But she admitted that the use of AI could undermine the reliability of some traditional forms of assessment, such as take-home essays, although other methods could be used as well.

“We will not judge a student’s understanding based on a simple assignment. Rather, we would introduce other assessment tools such as oral examinations,” Chiu said.

“ChatGPT may help them collect information they need or correct the grammar, but this would not affect their understanding of the subject.

“We should ensure that we always assess their understanding instead of just their knowledge of the subject.”

HKU provided teaching staff with access to ChatGPT in April, and access to Dall-E in early May.

The university in February imposed a temporary ban on GenAI programs.

But Professor Ian Holliday, HKU’s vice-president for teaching and learning, said there was “no change of mind at any point”.

“We wanted to be as responsible as we could be in making use of ChatGPT. We knew it was the future. We knew it back in February. But we didn’t have a policy in place to make it fair for all of our students,” he said.

Chiu said she had incorporated the use of AI into her assessments since April.

She added she had displayed some answers generated by ChatGPT for chemistry questions in a test paper for one of her courses and asked students to spot the defects in the answers.

“Answers generated by ChatGPT are not essentially correct. Students still need to judge with their knowledge, and the ability of critical thinking is still important,” Chiu said.

Justin Chan, studying education and starting second year in September, said he would consider exploring the uses of AI, but insisted the programs had limits.

“Assignments are designed to be finished by students themselves,” he said. “It is OK for me to use AI for solving some problems, but I can’t accept people copying a full essay generated by AI.”

Wen Like, studying for a master’s degree in industrial engineering and logistics management, backed the university’s decision.

He said he had used mirror sites of ChatGPT, not directly available in Hong Kong, for his work, but that they were limited.

“Data sets of the mirror sites were dated and couldn’t answer many of the questions,” Wen explained.

He added he treated ChatGPT as a “powerful search engine”.

“When I search for something I don’t know on Google, I sometimes cannot get a proper answer, but I can usually expect a good one from ChatGPT,” Wen said.

Lingnan University announced on Thursday it had bought a licence for version 3.5 of ChatGPT and would train students and staff to use the tool for teaching and learning.

Lecturers, under the new AI policy, can specify whether ChatGPT should be used for assignments and students could be required to submit a list of their prompts to the chatbot along with their work.

Joe Qin Sizhao, the president-designate and acting president of the university, said a new School of Data Science would be set up “in the near future”.

Lingnan introduced guidelines on the use of ChatGPT similar to those used by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which left it to professors to formulate policies.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong introduced ChatGPT guidelines in March, which required students to refer to course outlines for rules on its use, but emphasised that the tool was banned by default.

The guidelines warned that unauthorised use of the program constituted academic dishonesty.

Education University was the first tertiary institution in Hong Kong to fully embrace the use of GenAI.

A spokesman for City University said it would introduce the CityU GPT Chatbot powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI to its students and staff in the next academic year.

He emphasised that the university wanted to remind students to “use ChatGPT cautiously and scrutinise the accuracy of information it generates”.

“They should also abide by the university’s academic honesty guidelines,” the spokesman said.

He added that that CityU would provide AI literacy training to students and staff.

Polytechnic University told the Post on Friday it had provided students and teaching staff with access to ChatGPT and Bing Chat since August.

Monthly use of the tools are capped at 500,000 tokens per person, while teaching and clinical personnel are entitled to an additional 100,000 tokens per month per head for an advanced version of ChatGPT.

One token generally corresponds to four English characters.