logo
Opinion: We're losing the plot on AI in universities

Opinion: We're losing the plot on AI in universities

The Star4 days ago
An artificial intelligence furor that's consuming Singapore's academic community reveals how we've lost the plot over the role the hyped-up technology should play in higher education.
A student at Nanyang Technological University said in a Reddit post that she used a digital tool to alphabetise her citations for a term paper. When it was flagged for typos, she was then accused of breaking the rules over the use of generative AI for the assignment. It snowballed when two more students came forward with similar complaints, one alleging that she was penalised for using ChatGPT to help with initial research, even though she says she did not use the bot to draft the essay.
The school, which publicly states it embraces AI for learning, initially defended its zero-tolerance stance in this case in statements to local media. But Internet users rallied around the original Reddit poster, and rejoiced at an update that she won an appeal to rid her transcript of the academic fraud label.
It may sound like a run-of-the-mill university dispute. But there's a reason the saga went so viral, garnering thousands of upvotes and heated opinions from online commentators. It laid bare the strange new world we've found ourselves in, as students and faculty are rushing to keep pace with how AI should or shouldn't be used in universities.
It's a global conundrum, but the debate has especially roiled Asia . Stereotypes of math nerds and tiger moms aside, a rigorous focus on tertiary studies is often credited for the region's economic rise. The importance of education – and long hours of studying – is instilled from the earliest age. So how does this change in the AI era? The reality is that nobody has the answer yet.
Despite the promises from edtech leaders that we're on the cusp of 'the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,' the data on academic outcomes hasn't kept pace with the technology's adoption. There are no long-term studies on how AI tools impact learning and cognitive functions – and viral headlines that it could make us lazy and dumb only add to the anxiety. Meanwhile, the race to not be left behind in implementing the technology risks turning an entire generation of developing minds into guinea pigs.
For educators navigating this moment, the answer is not to turn a blind eye. Even if some teachers discourage the use of AI, it has become almost unavoidable for scholars doing research in the internet age. Most Google searches now lead with automated summaries. Scrolling through these should not count as academic dishonesty. An informal survey of 500 Singaporean students from secondary school through university conducted by a local news outlet this year found that 84% were using products like ChatGPT for homework on a weekly basis.
In China , many universities are turning to AI cheating detectors, even though the technology is imperfect. Some students are reporting on social media that they have to dumb down their writing to pass these tests or shell out cash for such detection tools themselves to ensure they beat them before submitting their papers.
It doesn't have to be this way. The chaotic moment of transition has put new onus on educators to adapt, and shift the focus on the learning process as much as the final results, Yeow Meng Chee , the provost and chief academic and innovation officer at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, tells me. This doesn't mean villainizing AI, but treating it as a tool, and ensuring a student understands how they arrived at their final conclusion even if they used technology. This process also helps ensure the AI outputs, which remain imperfect and prone to hallucinations (or typos), are checked and understood.
Ultimately, professors who make the biggest difference aren't those who improve exam scores but who build trust, teach empathy and instill confidence in students to solve complex problems. The most important parts of learning still can't be optimised by a machine.
The Singapore saga shows how everyone is on edge, and whether a reference-sorting website even counts as a generative AI tool isn't clear. It also exposed another irony: Saving time on a tedious task would likely be welcomed when the student enters the workforce – if the technology hasn't already taken her entry-level job. Demand for AI literacy in the labor market is becoming a must-have, and universities ignoring it does a disservice to cohorts entering the real world.
We're still a few years away from understanding the full impact of AI on teaching and how it can best be used in higher education. But let's not miss the forest for the trees as we figure it out. – Bloomberg
(Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News .)
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Google partners with Italy's Energy Dome on zero-emission power supply
Google partners with Italy's Energy Dome on zero-emission power supply

The Star

time10 hours ago

  • The Star

Google partners with Italy's Energy Dome on zero-emission power supply

FILE PHOTO: A logo is pictured at Google's European Engineering Center in Zurich, Switzerland July 19, 2018. Picture taken July 19, 2018. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo/File Photo MILAN (Reuters) -Italian energy storage firm Energy Dome said on Friday it had entered a commercial partnership with Google to supply carbon-free energy to the grids that power the operations of the U.S. tech giant. As part of the agreement, Google has made a strategic investment in Milan-based Energy Dome, which has developed a CO2 battery technology to support the energy transition through long-duration energy storage solutions, the companies said in a joint statement. They did not disclose the financial details. Google joins other investors in the Italian energy storage firm such as Oman's sovereign wealth fund and global tank storage operator Vopak. Google's first commercial long-duration energy storage deal is part of a growing number of advanced energy technologies the group needs to hit a goal to run its operations on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Energy Dome's CO2-based system stores energy by compressing and liquefying carbon dioxide, which is later expanded to generate electricity. The technology avoids the use of scarce raw materials such as lithium and copper, making it potentially attractive to European policymakers seeking to reduce reliance on critical minerals and bolster energy security. Energy Dome launched its first commercial-scale plant in Sardinia in 2022 with a view to completing it by the end of 2024, with a 24-hour cycle and a 20-megawatt capacity able to power 13,000-15,000 houses. (Reporting by Valentina Za; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

The Star

time19 hours ago

  • The Star

Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the US federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: prove their chatbots aren't "woke.' President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving "global dominance' in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed July 23 – the one "preventing woke AI in the federal government' – marks the first time the US government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order – products like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot – have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle – or try their best to quietly avoid it. "It will have massive influence in the industry right now,' especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems. "First off, there's no such thing as woke AI,' Montoya-Boyer said. "There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people.' Moulding the behaviours of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. "This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with,' said former Biden official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of Biden's AI industry initiatives. "Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language.' Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people. Trump's order targets those "top-down' efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the "destructive' ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including "concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.' For Secreto, the order resembles China's playbook in "using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints." The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation through its Cyberspace Administration, which audits AI models, approves them before they are deployed and requires them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. "The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage,' Secreto said. "That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing.' The order's call for "truth-seeking' AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who frequently uses that phrase as the mission for the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI. But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen. Despite a "rhetorically pointed' introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. "It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda,' just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, who is now head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. "Which is pretty light touch, frankly.' Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship. "There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output,' he said. "It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments. That's the exact opposite of the Chinese requirement.' So far, tech companies that have praised Trump's broader AI plans haven't said much about the order. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with what the order requires. Microsoft, a major supplier of email, cloud computing and other online services to the federal government, declined to comment Thursday. Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump's AI announcements as a "positive step' but didn't respond to a follow-up question about how Grok would be affected. xAI recently announced it was awarded a U.S. defense contract for up to US$200mil, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler. Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't immediately respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday. AI tools are already widely used in the federal government, including AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini for internal agency support to summarize the key points of a lengthy report. The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Trump's top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Much of their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors – including one user's request for American Founding Fathers that generated portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men – were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product, and made it a priority to do something about it. "It's 100% intentional,' said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. "That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, 'Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems.' Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order. "When they asked me how to define 'woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI,' Sacks wrote on X. Rufo responded that, in addition to helping define the phrase, he also helped "identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems.' – AP

DeepSeek, Trump's plan steer agenda at China's premier AI forum
DeepSeek, Trump's plan steer agenda at China's premier AI forum

The Star

time19 hours ago

  • The Star

DeepSeek, Trump's plan steer agenda at China's premier AI forum

SHANGHAI: Star founders, Beijing officials and deep-pocketed financiers converge on Shanghai by the thousands this weekend to attend China's most important AI summit. At the top of the agenda: how to propel Beijing's ambitions to leapfrog the US in artificial intelligence - and profit off that drive. The World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which has featured Elon Musk and Jack Ma in years past, was devised to showcase the cutting-edge of Chinese technology. This year's attendance may hit a record as it's taking place at a critical juncture in the US-Chinese tech rivalry. This week, US President Donald Trump unveiled his so-called AI Action Plan - a sort of call to arms to ensure the country keeps its lead in the post-ChatGPT epoch. At the same time, the emergence of DeepSeek in January galvanised a generation of Chinese developers to ride a nationwide investment and innovation wave. From Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to fledgling firms such as Minimax, the country's AI aspirants have since moved aggressively to try and close the gap with the likes of OpenAI and Google. "While many recognise DeepSeek's achievements, this represents just the beginning of China's AI innovation wave,' said Louis Liang, an AI sector investor with Ameba Capital. "We are witnessing the advent of AI mass adoption, this goes beyond national competition.' The Shanghai conference rundown for now remains largely unknown - as it has in years past just days before kickoff. Chinese Premier Li Qiang will attend, and tech leaders from Tencent Holdings Ltd. to ByteDance Ltd. and startups like Zhipu AI and Moonshot are likely to turn out in force. Here's what we can expect from the summit starting Saturday. DeepSeek's Aura Neither the startup nor its reclusive founder Liang Wenfeng feature in the advance literature for the event. And yet, the two-year-old firm is likely to be one of the topics du jour. Since its low-cost, high-performance AI model humbled much of Silicon Valley, the industry has watched China closely for another seismic moment. In a field notorious for splashing billions of dollars on Nvidia Corp. chips and data centres, DeepSeek's no-frills approach inspired a re-think of traditional models. And it challenged what till then was unquestioned US supremacy in bleeding-edge technology: Xi Jinping himself turned out in public in February to congratulate Liang and his fellow tech entrepreneurs. China craves another big breakthrough. Downloads and usage of DeepSeek models have slowed, as has the pace of new model rollouts that peaked over the spring at once every few days. Now, much of the industry talk centres on why DeepSeek's R2 - the followup to its seminal R1 - hasn't yet emerged. Local media have blamed everything from Liang's perfectionist streak to performance glitches. Trump's, and Xi's, Ambitions The conference gets underway days after the US leader signed executive orders to loosen regulations and expand energy supplies for data centres. "From this day forward, it'll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,' Trump told executives and lawmakers at a DC event. Among the attendees was Jensen Huang, whose Nvidia is one of the companies at the heart of the global AI movement. Much has been made in Washington of China's seemingly meteoric ascent in AI, with observers saying the country is now perhaps just months behind the US in terms of AI sophistication. That's a wafer-thin margin compared with sectors such as semiconductors, where America is regarded as many years or even generations ahead. Trump's newly announced action plan is likely to spur Chinese companies into accelerating their own plans to go global, in part by aggressively open-sourcing their AI platforms. Beijing wants AI to become a US$100 billion industry by 2030. At the Communist Party's April Politburo study session, Xi emphasised that China must push for breakthroughs in critical areas like high-end chips and AI research. Rise of the Robots Chinese humanoid makers are expected to showcase their most advanced models. Last week, UBTech posted a video of its Walker S2 humanoid walking to a battery station, removing the pack from its back, placing it on the recharge pad before fitting itself with a new battery. While obviously edited and choreographed, it encapsulated the advances that Chinese firms have made in a wide-open field - and their lofty ambitions. Unitree teased a bargain-basement price of under US$10,000 for its androids. It joins the likes of AgiBot and UBTech in collectively driving a promising field in which American companies have so far failed to stake out a clear lead, despite decades of effort. The Chinese companies "are targeting hundreds to thousands of units to be delivered this year, racing to establish the ecosystem,' Morgan Stanley analyst Sheng Wong said in a note this week. Show the Money Venture capitalists and deal-makers will be hunting for emerging tech leaders. And not all of them are Chinese. China's largest venture capital houses are tapping the market for at least US$2 billion in new funds. At least six of the country's most prominent VC firms - including Lightspeed China Partners and Monolith Management - are creating dollar-denominated funds designed to allow overseas investors to pool bets on Chinese companies. That's a wave of fundraising that hasn't been seen among Chinese VCs for years. It's unfolding as global investors reassess the country's startup landscape and economy, which are showing signs of revival after years of Covid-era stagnation and regulatory headwinds. Organizers promise a breakout event that will feature startup pitches and live demos for dealmakers. Startups by the hundreds are expected to fill a 70,000 sq-metre exhibition hall, showing off everything from autonomous delivery drones to machines that dispense toilet paper. Missing Global Touch Attendees are unlikely to spot US companies - at least not in major fashion. In 2024, Tesla Inc. popped up with its Cybertruck and Optimus robot. This year's speaker lineup doesn't (yet) include Musk but does list Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian scientist who pioneered artificial neural networks. With the US-China tech rivalry accelerating, many American companies remain wary of drawing the spotlight. Still, Beijing is likely to take the opportunity to continue pushing its international agenda. One of the conference centerpieces is a "High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance' to discuss the challenges in deploying AI responsibly. To many observers, it's also emblematic of China's overarching goal of setting global standards. "Since 2018, China has used WAIC to stake its claim on global AI technical and political leadership,' said Tom Nunlist, associate director of the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium. "With the race to AI now neck and neck between the US and China, that play is more compelling than ever.' - Bloomberg

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store