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

A filepic of a student of Texas Robotics showing an AI brain-computer interface allowing him to control his hand with his thoughts, during a press conference in Geneva on. 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. — Getty Images/TNS

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.