The University of Hong Kong (HKU) on Friday issued a temporary ban on students using the ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools for coursework, classwork and assessments, being the first and only institution in the metropolitan to issue such a ban.

It will take some time to draft a long-term policy on AI tools, said Professor Ian Holliday, vice president of teaching and learning of HKU, while announcing the ban via student e-mails.

"So we need to adopt a short-term policy as a temporary measure. We are banning the use of ChatGPT or any other AI-based tools for all classroom, coursework, and assignments at HKU."

If students want to use AI-based applications, they must obtain a written consent from their course instructor, otherwise, any violations will be regarded as potential plagiarism, said Holliday. 

If there is a suspicion of violation, teachers can call the student to discuss the assignment performance, require an additional oral exam or additional in-class exam, and take other measures, said the professor.

Global bans of ChatGPT

OpenAI's ChatGPT became an internet sensation when it was released without warning in November 2022, allowing users to experiment with its ability to write essays, articles and poems as well as computer code in just seconds.

Prompted by worries about plagiarism, ChatGPT has already been banned in schools and universities across the world.

Sciences Po, one of France's top universities, has banned the use of ChatGPT this January to prevent fraud and plagiarism, claiming that students caught using them might be expelled.

"Without transparent referencing, students are forbidden to use the software for the production of any written work or presentations, except for specific course purposes, with the supervision of a course leader," Sciences Po said, though it did not specify how it would track usage.

ChatGPT has already been banned in some public schools in New York City and Seattle, according to U.S. media reports, while several U.S. universities have announced plans to do fewer take-home assessments and more hand-written essays and oral exams.

In addition, RV University in Bangalore, India has prohibited students from using ChatGPT and may do spot checks on students suspected of using the AI, asking them to redo their work.

Surging concerns 

The boss of Google's search engine warned against the pitfalls of AI in chatbots in a newspaper interview published on February 12, as Google parent company Alphabet battles to compete with blockbuster app ChatGPT.

"The kind of artificial intelligence we're talking about right now can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination."

Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search, told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper, "This then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer." One of the fundamental tasks, he added, was keeping this to a minimum.

ChatGPT also attracted U.S. lawmakers' attention with questions about its impact on national security and education.

Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat on the House of Representatives Science Committee, said in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times that he was excited about AI and the "incredible ways it will continue to advance society," but also "freaked out by AI, specifically AI that is left unchecked and unregulated."

ChatGPT itself, when asked how it should be regulated, demurred and said: "As a neutral AI language model, I don't have a stance on specific laws that may or may not be enacted to regulate AI systems like me."

But it then went on to list potential areas of focus for regulators, such as data privacy, bias and fairness, and transparency in how answers are written.

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(With input from agencies)