Ina Conradi quoted in the South China Morning Post on AI in Singapore’s universities

Lim, K. (2026, August 18). Singapore’s universities race to embrace AI as job demands transform. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3364419/singapores-universities-race-embrace-ai-job-demands-transform

Photo Credit: The Learning Hub at the Nanyang Technological University. NTU students have been given full access to a suite of Google AI tools. Photo: Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Associate Professor Ina Conradi was quoted throughout Singapore’s universities race to embrace AI as job demands transform, by Kolette Lim, published in the South China Morning Post on 18 August 2026. The report covers the arrival of institution-wide AI access at NUS and NTU, employer demand for AI literacy, and the shift away from surveillance-based academic integrity.

” But analysts say educators still face the challenge of ensuring students use AI to sharpen their critical thinking rather than relying on it for quick answers and guidance.”

AI paradox

The paradox itself is the standard one about AI and creativity: the same tool that expands what a person can make also appears to erode the capacity to make it. It gives you more range and less practice at once. Put as a question, it is “how can a technology that multiplies creative output also reduce creativity?

If a student were to accept the first output from the prompt, the tool would become a substitute for thinking, said Ina Conradi Chavez, an associate professor at NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media. But if students were to reject, re-prompt and critique, the technology would help refine thinking, she added.

Still, Conradi highlighted several risks, such as the inability to discern AI-generated content from authorship and the acceptance of visually plausible but incorrect output.

Conradi urged institutions to teach students to use AI to examine bias and train data, rather than primarily for generative or interpretive purposes. “Students who only use AI generatively will be replaced by the next generation of tools and those who learn to interrogate AI critically will not.”

She highlighted that not all AI-assisted works should be put in the same box, noting the difference in user effort between continuously refining prompts and accepting the first output.

“Public conversation collapses everything into a single category called ‘AI art’ or ‘AI use’. That framing does real damage,” she said. “The paradox is real, but often framed the wrong way.”

The article also reported her change to assessment. Ina now grades documentation and oral explanation rather than the final artefact alone, requires students to record their exact prompts, rejections and reasoning, and asks them to present work on public screens and in exhibitions. “Assessment built around the finished artefact alone is increasingly meaningless,” she said. “The principle is now to assess the practice, not just the product.

AI kills creativity when students prompt once and accept the first output, that is closer to selecting from a catalogue than to making. AI complements creativity when students use it iteratively: prompting, critiquing, rejecting, re-prompting, layering their own hand back in. The tool then becomes a mirror to think against, not a substitute for thinking.

Read it: scmp.com