“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.

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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.

After warning in May that improper use of AI could hinder students’ thinking and lead to undesirable consequences such as plagiarism, the Education Bureau recently told more than 450 public secondary schools to incorporate 10 to 14 hours of AI education into classes for students in Form One to Three.

The Post visited Yu Chun Keung Memorial College to observe how teachers and students were using the AI tool.

In Ho’s class, ChatGPT told the students the boyfriend was angry, fearful or did not know how to react to the news that his girlfriend worked with dead bodies.

The teacher made her students share the AI-generated responses and discuss the boyfriend’s reaction, asking if it stemmed from feeling he had been misled, his own ignorance or superstition.

“Asking the students to think and elaborate on the few sentences generated by AI helps to train their thinking process, which will eventually help their creative writing skills,” Ho said.

Although ChatGPT could produce convincing responses within minutes, she said she could tell if students plagiarised using AI.

“My students’ writing sometimes touches me, but the stilted content AI tends to produce doesn’t,” she said.

One of her students, Cheung Sze-man, 16, said she was excited about using AI in class but realised its limitations while preparing for a debate on whether AI benefited human development.

She had to oppose the motion and asked ChatGPT for help.

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“It just said AI may replace humans, leading to unemployment and increased government burden. The explanation was insufficient without examples,” she said.

Cheung said she enjoyed using the AI tool for open-ended history questions.

History teacher Li Kwan-wai first used ChatGPT to organise materials in chronological order under categories such as the economy, society and military, to help his students practise their answers for public exams.

In one assignment, his students had to draw on historical events to say if political weaknesses or economic issues were more crucial to the rise of Japan’s militarism, before asking ChatGPT to do the same, and then comparing the answers.

“They had to enter appropriate historical examples and keywords to improve the initial answer generated by AI. They become the ‘teacher’ to address the shortcomings of the chatbot,” said Li, who has been teaching history for a decade.

“The process helped them to master the scoring requirements and different question types.”

When Form Five student Wun Siu-nam, 16, asked ChatGPT if Soviet communism or American capitalism was more influential during the Cold War, it first replied that the Soviet Union had the upper hand.

But when he asked it to elaborate, it cited a “data error” and then switched to saying the US was more influential.

Appreciating the human touch in class, he said: “Our teacher will guide us to think from different perspectives to understand historical events.”

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His classmate, Zhang Tsz-cheung, 17, agreed that teachers had the edge, not only in their human emotions, but also in having more current information.

“ChatGPT relies on digitised sources up to 2021, whereas our teacher gives us more updated perspectives in person,” he said.

Professor Eric Friginal, head of the department of English and communication at Polytechnic University, said integrating ChatGPT into classrooms was an effective way to prompt learner-machine interaction.

“This idea of educational technology highlights the interaction between students and machine that prompts their critical thinking and ability to discuss and debate what’s happening,” he said.

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But teachers still needed to guide the conversation and deepen students’ understanding to make up for potential bias and wrong information from AI, he added.

Assistant professor Gary Tang Kin-yat, of the department of social science at Hang Sang University, said it was good that the school had given out tablet computers for students to use.

Given the digital divide, he said some students might not be able to afford tablets or have an internet connection at home, so introducing the technology in school cut across economic or social barriers.

Yu Chun Keung Memorial College principal Yeung Hok-hoi said he was encouraged to see students improve in learning English with the help of AI.

“Teachers integrate material with ChatGPT, interrelating exercises in listening, speaking, reading and writing. They instruct AI to generate test papers for each aspect with the same vocabulary in similar contexts, so students continuously deepen their memory through exposure,” he said.

English teachers had begun using ChatGPT’s text-to-speech function to create listening exams, saving time and effort in recording.

Denise Chiu Ka-yun, an English language teacher for nearly two decades, acknowledged that saving time was the biggest advantage, but stressed that AI was “not almighty”.

“I know how to make my students feel more confident in learning, AI doesn’t,” she said.