National Tsing Hua University incorporates AI into humanities courses

Taipei, Feb. 29 (CNA) National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) has been incorporating generative AI education into humanities and social science courses, a school official said Thursday.

At a press conference, Wu Yung-hsien (巫勇賢), NTHU's dean of academic affairs, said that the university set up generative AI courses in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Education last semester.

Five more courses are set up for studies such as cultural analysis, history research, law and policy this semester, Wu said.

Although AI looks set to be ubiquitous in the future, such technology will not be able to replace humanities students trained in people-oriented critical thinking, Wu said.

Therefore, to maintain competence as technology advances and society changes, humanity students should use AI tools to exercise their advantages, he said.

Generative AI, in this case, ChatGPT, can be integrated into the courses in several ways, Wu said.

For example, it could propose a point of view during a discussion to initiate dialogue as well as prompt new and diverse ideas, Wu said.

It could also assist in technical issues such as adding sentence breaks to ancient text without punctuation marks, helping students to concentrate on their research and analyses, Wu added.

NTHU is Taiwan's first university to set up a work team dedicated to generative AI. The team has started a series of workshops and general courses since last semester, Wu said.

The university also planned applied artificial intelligence programs for students of both technical and non-technical backgrounds, according to its website.

Hung Jui-chen (洪睿辰), a student enrolled in NTHU's Interdisciplinary Program of Humanities and Social Sciences, told Thursday's press conference that he took an elective course and found it to be a stepping stone to help him understand how to use AI for scriptwriting.

Hung said generative AI was useful for material collection and interpreting scripts or current events but its writing was not original or unique.

This demonstrates that human thoughts and emotions are irreplaceable, Hung added.