PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE Is protection possible? Ancient genes, modern miracles Billion-year-old molecular tools unlock the power of stem cells Guided by nature Engineers mimic bird agility to boost drone speed and safety NOV 2025 Volume 27 No.1 THE CREATIVITY CHALLENGE What AI means for human creativity May 2026 No.2 A Nobel vision for preventive care HKU welcomes attosecond pioneer Professor Ferenc Krausz AI eyes building cracks Ultra-fast phone-based scans save ageing high-rises
Contents 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 The Creativity Challenge Beating the Bot Artists’ Dilemma In the Picture Protecting Human Creativity from AI’s Grip The Challenge to ‘Creative Cities’ Teaching about the Future of Creativity Cover Story 16 18 20 22 24 Walking the Walk Mind over Matter The Physical Toll of Antipsychotics Health Research Takes a Carbon Toll Energy – Anytime, Anywhere Research 26 28 30 32 34 36 A School for Fresh Approaches Powering Hong Kong’s Healthtech Ambitions Fast Forward Preparing for the New World Order Asking the Big Questions Hitting the Right Note Teaching and Learning 38 40 Fast Track to Pain Relief Check It Out Knowledge Exchange 42 44 46 Humanities on the Rise Nobel Winner Seeks to Transform Medicine Hooked on the Fundamentals People 48 50 Notions of China Murder, He Wrote . . . Books
With the advent of AI, anyone with a computer can aspire to generate new films, songs, worlds and stories at the tap of a few keys. What does that mean for human creativity? HKU scholars have been investigating whether AI outperforms human creativity, how it is changing storytelling, how it might be regulated to protect humans, and the implications for society. THE CREATIVITY CHALLENGE What AI means for human creativity HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 2 3
HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 4 5 Professor Dawei Wang This is a quite powerful finding because it shows that humans have great diversity, but AI does not. AI developers are known for making bold statements about their products. In 2023, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman proposed that AI could be creative. A year later, his then-Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati asserted AI could even take over some creative jobs. To Professor Dawei Wang of HKU Business School, those statements were provocative. “I was very curious to know how AI compares to humans in terms of creativity,” he said. The answer came in a collaboration with Professor Haipeng Shen, Patrick S C Poon Professor in Analytics and Innovation and Chair of Business Analytics and Innovation, in a paper for Nature Human Behaviour, with a cover illustration painted by former fine art student Professor Wang. The journal’s editors told them this was one of the few large-scale studies they had seen comparing human and AI performance. The team zeroed in on one measure of creativity – divergent or out-of-the box thinking – by asking people and AI platforms to create 10 words as different from each other as possible. Data was collected from 10,000 humans in Asia, North America, Europe and Australia, and 200,000 prompted responses from various AI platforms. A groundbreaking study comparing creativity in humans and AI models finds their average scores are nearly identical. But closer inspection reveals that human diversity gives people a decisive edge. Beating the Bot Humans score on diversity Interestingly, the results between humans living on different continents and between different AI platforms were consistent. But deeper investigations revealed marked differences between people and machines. Humans displayed huge variation in their scores, ranging from around 35 to 95, while AI scores were within a much more limited range of 70 to 85. “This is a quite powerful finding because it shows that humans have great diversity, but AI does not. We also found that humans can generate many more unique words than AI,” Professor Wang said. In a robustness check, the professors randomly drew 1,000 words from human and AI responses and found people used an average 577 unique words, while AI only used 181 unique words. There was also much greater diversity of word choice between people, whereas AI models tended to produce similar results, such as variations of ‘cloud-apple-computer’, because they are all trained on the same pool of words. “One of the messages we want to convey is that human diversity is what separates us from machines. We should not over-rely on AI to help us, or we could lose our uniqueness,” Professor Shen said. Nonetheless, while AI does not have the ability to innovate and create new knowledge – at least not yet – it still has a useful role to play in supporting human creativity, they said. It performs particularly well in summarising knowledge. The results, on the surface, were surprising. Both humans and AI scored an average of about 79 out of 100. “We did not expect this,” Professor Shen said, “but once we saw it, it made sense. Because large language models are regression models trained on human data, they learn from us. On average, they should score the same as us.” Seeking hope Professor Shen and Professor Wang have embarked on that path through an Executive Master of Business Administration course on AI and creativity. Professor Wang developed the platform Beat the Bot that lets students test themselves on divergent thinking. Students each input 10 words, then select an AI to compare scores. Subsequently, they work in teams and collaborate with AI to test out words and improve the divergency of their list. This has led to overall higher scores and engaged discussion around the class, he said. A teaching package based around Beat the Bot has been developed that includes discussion questions and reflection points and has been used with students in other programmes and with others outside HKU. The teaching simulation recently won HKU’s Teaching Innovation Award. Going forward, the professors want to test AI and humans on convergent thinking – the ability to find common ground between different things. “The goal of Beat the Bot is to give people hope and make them confident of their own human abilities,” Professor Wang said. “We believe the correct way forward is for humans and AI to work together.” Professor Shen cautioned, though, that while those who perform below average could improve with the right AI tool, those already performing well should not rely too heavily on AI because that may diminish their uniqueness. He also expressed concern about the importance of making AI tools accessible. “What happens to people who do not have the resources to access AI tools? What can they do to survive? This is a much bigger societal problem,” he said. This points to the importance of human-AI collaboration, although the development of this is still in its early days. One idea is for humans to generate initial ideas, then give AI tasks to improve on them. Users would need strong soft skills, such as leadership, team management, communication, and storytelling, which Professor Shen believes points a path forward for future educators.
Artists’ Dilemma Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can help artists quickly produce a good standard of work. But achieving creative excellence and uniqueness is another matter, as two HKU Business School studies show. Finding encouragement give a more fine-grained understanding of both creativity and how GenAI can be used to enhance it. He also thinks artists can find encouragement. “Our conclusion is that AI helps artists to be more creative, specifically in a digital platform context. So maybe artists do not have to feel overwhelmed by AI. They can use it, get inspired, and may produce more creative artwork,” he said. “It’s a paradox. GenAI increases creativity to some extent, but this kind of creativity does not affect sales. GenAI does not affect creativity at a radical level, but that is the very factor that affects sales,” he said. Professor Fang is also Director of IDEI and he believes there are takeaways for the business world. Behavioural studies in his field do not tend to break creativity down into components. Doing so can GenAI was more related to an increase in content creativity of those organic works, but not visual creativity,” Professor Fang said. This had implications on their value. GenAI use did not lead to a higher premium for artworks. Instead, the most important factors were the artist’s reputation and their ‘radical’ visual creativity. (Think of Picasso and Monet, who might paint the same subjects but in very different styles.) Professor Fang’s research focussed on the digital art market, particularly whether GenAI makes artists more creative and whether that adds monetary value to their artwork. He and his team, Dr Bingjie Qian and Mr Yangchen Mou of HKU’s Institute of Digital Economy and Innovation (IDEI), worked with 415,906 digital paintings by 3,355 artists on a prominent trading platform that requires artists to disclose if they use GenAI, though not how they use it. Existing technologies were used to analyse content creativity (themes and topics) and visual creativity (artist’s personal style). The innovation of the works was also assessed on how much they differed from the artist’s previous work and from other artists. Artist reputation based on how many medals they had been awarded was also factored in, as were measures to validate their truthfulness in GenAI disclosures. The results showed GenAI could increase creativity, but with some important caveats. “The use of Early research on the nascent field of GenAI creativity has produced intriguing but conflicting results. Some have found it inspires artists to push at the boundaries, while others find it homogenises output. Professor Jie Gong and Professor Yulin Fang of the HKU Business School recently added more nuanced conclusions on GenAI’s effects in separate investigations that looked at the production of art and whether the use of GenAI leads to higher valuation. Professor Gong and co-authors, Professor Jin Li of HKU, Mr Zibo Zhao and Dr Yvonne Jie Chen, focussed on art production, comparing human output with and without GenAI support to see how AI assistance affects artists’ motivation and the resulting quality. Some 219 professional and student artists were tasked with producing two works of art inspired by text excerpts from literature in two 150-minute sessions. In the first session, they used only their preferred mediums. In the second, the artists were randomly divided: 168 could also use GenAI while the rest continued as usual as the control group. The whole process was videotaped and independent judges from academia and industry assessed the works at different stages, from initiation to completion. The findings revealed two things. First, GenAI-assisted works quickly achieved higher quality than the unassisted works. But at the 60-minute mark it plateaued. “Going from reasonably good to excellent was harder to achieve,” Professor Gong said. The works produced without GenAI, however, kept improving. This dovetailed with the second finding that GenAI had a negative impact on the artists’ motivation. Many of those using GenAI stopped working at the 60-minute mark, making a rational trade-off that the extra effort would offer diminishing returns. Those without GenAI worked right up to the deadline and the quality of their work increased throughout their session. (Interestingly, 20 per cent of artists given AI access chose not to use the tool.) “Individuals using GenAI can produce good enough outcomes with remarkable speed, only to labour extensively for the additional improvement that marks true quality,” Professor Gong said. “This is the essence of the GenAI paradox: better technology, worse motivation.” The implications go well beyond the art world. Those working in fields that require creative input, such as marketing, might find it more profitable to trade quality for quantity to meet deadlines and handle workloads. But if excellence is the goal, they may need encouragement to go the extra mile. “The direct implication is that the pursuit of excellence will be even harder because the technology makes it so efficient to stop working earlier. GenAI is not going to help get the best output. Quite the opposite – it encourages people to settle for ‘good enough’,” she said. HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 6 7 Individuals using GenAI can produce good enough outcomes with remarkable speed, only to labour extensively for the additional improvement that marks true quality. This is the essence of the GenAI paradox: better technology, worse motivation. Professor Jie Gong
In the Picture Virtual reality (VR) technology, now assisted by AI, is changing how stories are told and experienced. Professor Tim Gruenewald of the Faculty of Arts has been following VR’s development for over a decade and explains its significance. Books, movies and games that completely absorb one’s attention have long been described as ‘immersive’. But advances in VR production and headset technology are taking absorption to a whole other level. In Encounter Dinosaurs, developed by Hollywood director Jon Favreau, viewers find themselves in a prehistoric landscape where they come eye to eye with dinosaurs and react to each other. In The Book of Distance, a VR documentary film about artist Randall Okita’s grandfather’s experiences in a Japanese internment camp in Canada in World War II, the viewer is dropped into family scenes, interacts with objects such as a camera, and is asked to take photos at different moments in the family’s history to help ‘create’ a visual record. For film specialist Professor Tim Gruenewald, who has been following the key events in cinematic virtual reality, this represents a turning point for storytelling. “Every new medium draws heavily from the previous media and adds something else – print offered mass Holding viewers’ attention Imitating styles AI-enhanced VR is making such engagement easier to achieve. Until recently, huge effort and expense were required to create virtual worlds and embodied experiences. High-end productions, such as the acclaimed game Half-Life: Alyx, cost tens of millions of US dollars each. This limited the growth of the VR market, which nonetheless encompasses about 200 million users, generated about US$20 billion in revenue in 2024, and is growing at 10–20 per cent annually. Much faster adoption is likely to occur in the future as VR headsets become lighter and easier to use and, importantly, virtual world-building becomes much cheaper. All it takes is a few strokes on a keyboard, using AI such as Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, which was launched as a limited release in summer 2025. While the technology can only produce brief VR experiences at this stage, it is possible to imagine that almost anyone could one day produce a filmlike VR story with a fixed timeline, or an open-world sandbox where the user takes more control of the story or events. Yet these developments also raise new challenges for storytelling. When the user can walk around the virtual world and gaze anywhere, instead of at the characters or the action, extra effort will need to be made to keep their attention, for example, through lighting, sound or staging. The social enjoyment of watching a movie and sharing opinions might be undermined when everyone is shaping their own virtual experiences. “Challenges are what usually demand creativity,” he said. AI’s involvement also gives rise to the question of just who the creator is – the human or the AI. Professor Gruenewald takes a nuanced view. There will always be co-creations by humans and AI, but AI is also not simply a tool. For one thing, it is able to conjure a dense amount of visual information from just a few words in a prompt, using processes that are not so different from humans. “When AI creates worlds, it takes input from all the images it is trained on. So do we. If I make a film with a 2D camera, nobody will deny that that’s an act of creativity. The way I put it together is informed by my conscious and subconscious viewing of numerous archives of photography and film in the preceding years, but I create something that you cannot find in the archive. “AI can do the same. It may create something new that you won’t find in the archive. Yes, it imitates styles, but so do humans. The AI models are moving very fast and – for now – they are waiting for our prompts. We can push them to be more creative and more inventive.” The downside to this is that realistic VR and AI images are already used to create false images, accelerating current social divisions and undermining our trust in what we see and hear, putting entire political systems at risk, he said. “It’s depressing. It’s also exciting. I can’t believe what this technology can already create, how it can also make things better. I find it’s an exciting time to work with AI right now, with so many challenges.” distribution, film brought moving images. With VR media, for the first time, you can have an embodied, immersive and interactive experience with the fictional world,” he said. “Conventional Hollywood would never acknowledge your presence because that breaks the suspension of disbelief. But in VR, the characters can look at you and talk to you, and you have the impression that they see you, that you are in their space. This can strengthen the emotional impact of the story.” With virtual reality media, for the first time, you can have an embodied, immersive and interactive experience with the fictional world. Professor Tim Gruenewald HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 8 9
HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 10 11 Professor Haochen Sun I can foresee that an enormous amount of AIgenerated content could end up being protected by copyright law because the threshold as the law stands – called the ‘originality requirement’ – is extremely low. Every big AI platform has faced lawsuits for using existing creative works to train their models without permission or compensation, with plaintiffs ranging from Hollywood studios to media outlets to individual artists and authors. For Professor Haochen Sun, Founding Director of HKU’s Programme on Artificial Intelligence and the Law and an expert in technology law and policy, this use of creative works is a legal and ethical problem for both creators and society. “These works are the foundation of our human civilisation. They embody human thought, from philosophy to literature, music and art, and they should be highly valued. When they’re used in the AI training process, it demeans their value by transforming them into tokens. What would be the implications, then, for the future of human creativity?” he asked. Using content without permission is problematic on several fronts, he said. First, whoever controls the inputs to the AI training process can shape how AI develops and makes decisions, so the creators who provide that input could be excluded. Second, there is the possibility that copyright protection could extend to AI-generated material, knowingly or not. While most jurisdictions do not allow this (apart from one judge in the Chinese Mainland Professor Haochen Sun of the Faculty of Law has been looking at the threats to human creativity from AI, and possible legal and ethical remedies. Protecting Human Creativity from AI’s Grip In awe of AI In such a scenario, ‘AI copyright trolls’ may be incited to launch lawsuits to see what they could extract. Most importantly, content flows to the public domain would be restricted, ultimately harming human creativity. “When we human beings create new works, we learn from public domain materials and even use them in the process of creation. Borrowing and learning from others’ works and ideas are essential to human creativity,” he said. AI platforms disrupt that process not only by breaching copyright. They also diminish existing works through their tokenisation in the training process, which suggests the companies do not take human creative content seriously. At the same time, AI-generated content is becoming more powerful on the back of these works. “People have become in awe of AI creativity instead of our own creativity,” he said, despite the greater richness of human creativity. Professor Sun has identified three reasons why human creativity is unique and merits enhanced protection: humans create new works with intention, while AI responds to prompts; human works represent the embodiment of emotions along aesthetic, intellectual and moral dimensions, while AI does not have these multidimensional experiences; and humans can control the creative process, while AI output is controlled by its algorithms. who decided that an AI prompt was creative input), Professor Sun believes there is little to stop humans from presenting AI content as their own. “It’s so easy to conceal this content and pretend it was made by a human,” he said. “I can foresee that an enormous amount of AI-generated content, ranging from text answers to images and videos, could end up being protected by copyright law because the threshold as the law stands – called the ‘originality requirement’ – is extremely low.” Reining it in Professor Sun has made a start on that challenge through three projects that apply legal and ethical principles to nurture human creativity and rein in AI. One project examines the legal status of AI-generated content under copyright law. He proposes that copyright law should not protect works generated by AI systems and instead, such works should go into the public domain. At the same time, he suggests AIaffiliated content that has been substantially altered by humans to create something new could receive copyright protection. A second project is about the transparency of AI outputs. Professor Sun identified fundamental differences between the creative capabilities of humans and AI systems by applying relevant philosophical theories, which led him to propose regulating the output transparency of AI-generated content by attaching watermarks, to make them more easily differentiated from human-created works. The third project aims to elevate the value of highly creative human works and distinguish them from AI by promoting the concept of ‘super creativity’. He proposes major financial prizes as well as legal mechanisms requiring authors or their estates to register works 20 years after they are published. “I see a tendency for more and more people to outsource their thinking capacity and creative activities to AI systems, and for AI-generated content to be competing with humans. If we don’t do anything to stop this, humans will lose out,” he said, especially given AI’s capacity to generate vast amounts of content. “We must make an effort to subvert that process, to encourage people to use AI only as a tool, and to emphasise human learning. We cannot simply surrender ourselves to AI.” “The uniqueness of human creativity is why we need to protect and promote it through more robust regulation of AI systems,” he said.
Professor Patrick Adler With AI, though, something transformative is happening because it lowers the number of people you need on a team. You don’t need to be centred anymore. Transitions matter Still, AI threatens to disrupt things. To avert that, he believes the transition to the technology needs to be handled carefully, especially given the current unevenness of its adoption. In areas such as coding, it is replacing core work, while in fields like film production, adoption is patchy – visual effects specialists and film editors are embracing it, but screenwriters are shunning it. AI adoption may also require additional time spent interacting with it and monitoring its output, at least initially, which could reduce HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 12 13 Lessons from the recent past On the other hand, there is the traditional importance of teams and collaboration to creative output, especially when it comes to complex products such as films and new phone technology. Being in close proximity not only makes workers more productive, it makes them perform better, he said. They establish common standards, which is important for maintaining and increasing quality. Knowing those standards and not having to explain them to each other can also speed up production. Clustering also fosters trust and encourages innovation. “If you’re living in the same physical community as your buyers or the people you’re buying from, you’re going to be able to take more risks because you trust more. And there’s the idea that you will treat each other fairly today because you’ll have to encounter each other again tomorrow. When you’re less physically proximate, that’s less the case.” Geographers have long observed that creative economic activities tend to cluster in space. Despite technological advances and books such as The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, the need for workers to gather in person has persisted, especially for activities requiring creative thinking and input, such as finance and software innovations and film production. productivity. These transitional costs should not be left to chance, though. “Transitions matter. It’s a mistake to think that we will just eventually adopt these technologies, because while that may be true, the ones we adopt really matter. The wrong technology could predominate,” he said, citing the example of Betamax, which was technologically superior to VHS [Video Home System] but stumbled at the market. Creative industries therefore need to recognise that AI is here to stay and act on that. “The question is, is there something transformative about AI where people don’t need to be centred anymore? You don’t want to be historically naïve, but these technologies are qualitatively different and they are disruptive. We’ve been here before, so it’s worth thinking through what happened in the recent past,” he said. But the advent of AI has put a new question mark over clustering. Professor Patrick Adler in the Department of Geography, who specialises in the creative economy, has started to grapple with the issue. The digital age and the emergence of diffusion technologies, such as the Internet, personal computers and mobile devices, were predicted to replace the need to cluster. This did not happen because revenue and new technologies continued to be generated from clusters, and teams still needed to meet face-to-face to function properly. “With AI, though, something transformative is happening because it lowers the number of people you need on a team. You don’t need to be centred anymore. Maybe,” he said, “this time will be different.” He pointed to the prediction, first mooted two years ago by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, that a one-person, US$1 billion company is on the horizon – something that would be built by an individual using AI with no other humans explicitly involved. “It’s very instructive that OpenAI is very small, that the DeepSeek team is very small. You would have thought they would need thousands of people, but they don’t. If there are smaller teams, there will be less need to concentrate physically. So it appears AI could become a decentring force,” he said. The Challenge to ‘Creative Cities’ The recent past has also shown that, if anything, technology might make proximity even more important. Despite the advent of email and instant messaging, the most important decisions still get made face-to-face. “We never would have predicted that – the idea would have been that more work would happen at a distance because of the technology. But somehow, this increased the value of being close to the centre. People who are near head office do better than people who are far away. Another countervailing point is that the AI companies, like Nvidia and OpenAI, are all coming from the Bay Area, and they’re even more concentrated than in previous technological waves,” he said. Hong Kong also has a concentration of people involved in what Professor Adler calls ‘creative inputs’ – using creativity and cognitive powers to generate value in finance, consulting and the like. The Greater Bay Area is starting to see clustering similar to Silicon Valley, while Korea has become a global hub of creative products. Creative activities tend to cluster in places such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but could this change with AI?
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can produce art, videos, stories and other outputs normally associated with creativity. But whether that makes it creative is debatable. Two new Common Core courses, one led by Kathryn Goldstein, Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, and the other by Professor Bo Dai of the HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science, are pushing students to think more deeply about a technology that is reshaping their future. Tellingly, the professors themselves are far from in accord on the topic. Ms Goldstein, in her course ‘Who Made This? Authorship and Art in the Age of AI’, takes a guarded view. She presents creativity as both a series of choices and a social experience, and she explores whether past technological innovations contain insights into whether AI can meet this definition. “We look at photography, which in the beginning was seen more as a form of non-creative documentation of history or scientific findings. Gradually, it came to be seen as a real art form, so I ask my class whether AI can be viewed similarly – whether it expands creative choices or steers us towards the path of least resistance,” she said. He also thinks AI has some features that qualify as creative – such as the ability to find connections and generate new ideas from that. Take hallucinations, where AI generates different (and sometimes wrong) answers from identical prompts. “People who see AI as a tool are very annoyed by this result and want to diminish hallucinations. But those who see GenAI as an assistant, or a source of inspiration, like the hallucinations and want to brainstorm together with AI,” he said. “You can hardly describe GenAI as just a tool if it gives you something you did not think of yourself.” His students have designed new applications for GenAI and their results – human-led but AI-enabled – show AI’s potential in collaboration. They turned a story into a video with music, created a variety of quizzes based on teaching materials and lecture notes, and built a digital avatar from audio recordings and images of a deceased relative to ‘converse’ with them again. Nonetheless, Professor Dai says the current state of AI is also the worst of times because of the lack of governance and clear boundaries for AI use and the proliferation of fake content. Technical limitations also persist. “Current AI just learns in a passive way – it does not know what it does not know. It also never asks questions,” he said, echoing Professor Goldstein’s concerns. “I think it is impossible that AI will replace people,” he added, “but the people who know how to use it will have the advantage. Since there is no standard answer on how to use it yet, everybody can be creative.” Best and worst of times But this cautious perspective is not the only view on AI and creativity. Professor Dai takes a more optimistic view in his course ‘GenAI and the Future of Creativity’, because he thinks AI offers opportunities for more people to be creative. “Someone without much expertise in AI technology or creative skills can find unique uses for AI, for instance, turning their holiday photos into a Disney-style animation,” he said. “In that sense, it is the best of times because everyone can shine.” They soon find AI is not really designed to promote choice. “Most people want AI to answer questions and complete tasks, not help them make creative choices. Even if you ask AI to, say, have a conversation with you about a paper you are writing, it will try everything it can to write the paper for you. This is the way the models are designed and marketed, to give people what they want,” she said. To demonstrate the choice limitations, she asked students to participate in an alternative uses test – commonly used by computer scientists to benchmark AI creativity – by suggesting different uses for an HKU hoodie, then seeking ideas from AI. The students’ own ideas were more varied and unusual, such as using it as a slingshot, while they found different AI models all gave similar answers, such as using the hoodie as a belt or for expressing school spirit. Most of the students also found AI frustrating for creative work, even when it could improve individual performance. “On average, AI may generally outperform the average person on creative tasks, but it’s a technological feature of these models that they arrive at similar, average understanding of different concepts and words, whereas people come up with strange and unique responses. If we rely on them as a society, we are going to be led towards less creativity,” Ms Goldstein said. The social experience was also undermined by the uncanny feeling evoked upon learning that content, such as music or videos, had been created by AI, not people, she added. Professor Bo Dai You can hardly describe GenAI as just a tool if it gives you something you did not think of yourself. HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Cover Story 14 15 Two Common Core courses are encouraging students to engage in the debate on whether AI can be creative, one from an arts perspective, the other from engineering. Teaching about the Future of Creativity
Walking the Walk The results of a large-scale study suggest the health benefits of walking are not just about how much you walk – how fast you walk matters too, underlining the importance of incorporating walking into comprehensive cancerprevention strategies. “Our study provides new evidence that a faster walking speed is associated with a reduced risk of developing any cancer and lung cancer, independently of physical activity level and grip strength,” said research team leader Professor Cheung Ching-lung, Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy at HKUMed. “We are also the first to show that C-reactive protein, white blood cell count, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and glucose levels together mediated around one-fourth of the association between walking speed and cancer risk.” The study utilised two prospective cohorts: one from a Hong Kong Osteoporosis Study (HKOS) and the other from the UK Biobank. UK participants (in the age range of 37– 73) self-reported their own walking pace, while those in Hong Kong (in Researchers have found that increasing walking speed could provide additional benefits in reducing cancer risk, by potentially improving immune and metabolic functions. HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Research 16 17 are not only resource-intensive and costly, but also difficult to execute due to the challenge of achieving and sustaining meaningful changes in participants’ exercise habits and adherence over time,” said Professor Cheung. “Nevertheless, our observational findings offer supportive evidence that a simple, accessible modification – increasing habitual walking speed – may help reduce cancer risk without requiring major lifestyle overhauls or specialised facilities.” In conclusion, Professor Cheung made a suggestion: “If you come across this article, consider taking it as a gentle nudge to make positive changes in your lifestyle. Adjusting exercise habits can be challenging and takes time, but it’s never too late to start. The benefits begin the moment you take that first step – so why not begin today?” “Walking speed is a key parameter reflecting muscle health. Thus, we aimed to evaluate if walking speed can predict cancer risk,” said Professor Cheung. “Skeletal muscle plays a crucial role in regulating inflammatory and metabolic pathways. Sarcopenia, for example, is linked to chronic inflammation and dysfunction of lipid and glucose metabolism. These dysregulations are known to contribute to cancer progression.” The ideal next step for this line of research would be to conduct a well-designed clinical trial with an exercise intervention, he said. However, such trials are challenging to implement. “Interventional studies involving physical activity In the HKOS, a timed six-metre walk test was performed during the in-person assessments between 2015 and 2019. Participants were instructed to walk along a six-metre straight line at a comfortable pace. Walking speed (in m/s) was then calculated by dividing the distance by the time walked. Previous studies have focussed mainly on the relationship between walking duration and frequency with cancer incidence and mortality, and so have measured walking over longer distances. Since this study was specifically looking at speed, they used the timed six-metre walk test which is a standard, validated method to objectively measure usual (habitual or normal) walking speed – not maximal effort, endurance, or cardiovascular response like heart rate elevation. “It’s specifically designed as a brief, reliable proxy for overall gait speed and physical function, rather than a prolonged exercise challenge,” said Professor Cheung. In defining what constitutes a fast walking speed, he explained that a speed of 1.2 m/s – equivalent to approximately 4.32 kilometres per hour (km/h) – is associated with the lowest observed risk of cancer, beyond which further increases in speed show limited additional benefit. “For context, conventional jogging speeds typically range from 6.44 to 9.66 km/h (with a midpoint of about 8 km/h), meaning 1.2 m/s is roughly half the speed of moderate jogging,” he said. While confirming that the results would likely apply to other forms of exercise, such as swimming or running, provided the exercise effectively trains major muscle groups, the team chose to concentrate on walking as the most convenient exercise option since it requires no special equipment or specific venue. Timed walk Muscle health the age range of 27–96) underwent a timed six-metre walking test. The findings showed that fast walkers in Hong Kong had a 45 per cent lower overall risk of developing cancer while those in the UK had a 13 per cent decrease. Several factors may be contributing to the discrepancy between the two risk percentages for the UK and Hong Kong, including: the difference in age range of the participants; the fact that one group were self-reporting and the other being objectively measured; and differences in ethnicity and lifestyle. The most significant drop was observed in lung cancer, with risk falling by up to 53 per cent in the UK cohort, suggesting that faster walking may help protect the respiratory system and reduce cancer risk. For the UK Biobank, walking speed was assessed using a self-reported question: How would you describe your usual walking pace? Participants were provided with three options: ‘slow’, ‘steady/average’, or ‘brisk’, which correspond to walking speeds of below 3 miles per hour (mph) or 1.34 metres per second (m/s); 3–4 mph or 1.34–1.79 m/s; and above 4 mph or 1.79 m/s, respectively. Our observational findings offer supportive evidence that a simple, accessible modification – increasing habitual walking speed – may help reduce cancer risk without requiring major lifestyle overhauls or specialised facilities. Professor Cheung Ching-lung
“The central novelty across the three studies is a new generation of AI-inspired brain decoding models that, for the first time, allow us to precisely read out how people consciously experience emotions from brain activity,” said research leader Professor Benjamin Becker from the MIND & AI Lab at the Department of Psychology. “This includes fear as well as the intensity of emotional experiences (affective arousal) under highly dynamic conditions close to real life.” The team combined advanced MRI-based brain scanning with AI-inspired decoding to overcome what he terms a fundamental limitation of traditional By combining AI-inspired models with brain imaging, a series of recent studies has revealed how the brain generates emotional experiences in real-life situations and how novel treatments can reduce social anxiety. Mind over Matter approaches. For decades, researchers in hundreds of studies have measured how single brain regions respond to isolated, static stimuli – such as briefly presented pictures of fearful faces. But this approach could not comprehensibly capture how the brain actually constructs thoughts and feelings. “Our AI-inspired models change that,” said Professor Becker. “They simultaneously read out information from hundreds of brain regions and the communication between them, allowing us to measure what a person consciously experiences.” Social fear “We are currently testing oxytocin in mental disorders, including autism, where social fear is a core challenge,” said Professor Becker. “More broadly, our AI-inspired brain models can accelerate treatment discovery and evaluation – for instance by objectively testing whether a new treatment truly changes conscious fear experience in the situations that matter most to patients.” Asked why it is important to specifically measure the subjective experience of emotions such as fear, Professor Becker said: “Emotions include our subjective experience but are always accompanied by strong bodily responses – your heart races when you are afraid. But these bodily reactions are not really specific to any particular emotion. Think of two people on a rollercoaster: one is terrified, the other is thrilled – they share the same racing heart, yet their subjective emotional experience is completely different. “For over a century, psychology has debated whether these automatic bodily reactions can truly be separated from the conscious feeling itself. Our technological advances now allow us to demonstrate that the brain basis of subjective feelings is indeed distinguishable from the more general bodily responses.” “This also carries important implications for current debates about AI and consciousness: one of the most fundamental conscious experiences – emotional arousal – does not appear to require bodily input. This bears critical implications for debates on whether AI – lacking a body and physical presence – can develop consciousness. To take these implications forward, we have launched a new Strategic Research Theme ‘AI, Society & Social Dynamics’ at the Faculty of Social Sciences.” Combination is key “This combined approach is key,” said Professor Becker. “There have been previous models for tracking fear and other emotions from brain activity, but we found that every single one of them failed when it came to fear experienced in more realistic, life-like contexts. Our models are the first to succeed in this.” The new models provide objective, brain-based measures of conscious emotional experience, which opens up new strategies for diagnosis and for testing new treatments. “These advances are important beyond technical progress or scientific debates,” said Professor Becker. “Emotional dysregulation is at the heart of the most common mental health disorders – that is, depression and anxiety – which represent the leading cause of disability and suffering worldwide.” Among these disorders, social anxiety disorder is one of the most prevalent mental health conditions – roughly one in 13 people will suffer from it during their lifetime. It is characterised by intense fear in social situations that goes far beyond ordinary shyness, triggering overwhelming distress and leading people to avoid the social interactions that are essential for a fulfilling life. One of the new strategies with a hypothesised efficacy in reducing anxiety is the neuropeptide oxytocin, and Professor Becker’s laboratory tested this hypothesis. “There have been no fundamentally new pharmacological treatments for anxiety disorders in decades,” he said. “We wanted to advance treatment development and tested whether the neuropeptide oxytocin can reduce fear specifically in social contexts. It did – Oxytocin selectively reduced subjective fear in social situations but not in non-social ones, an effect we could precisely track at the brain level using our AI-inspired models.” This was exactly the profile the team was hoping for: they would not want to simply switch off all fear, given that fear is vital for survival, but to specifically reduce it in social situations when it becomes disabling. In more detail, the technique used combines advanced MRI scanning with AI-inspired decoding and carefully designed psychological experiments that induce immersive and dynamic emotional experiences resembling everyday life. The models learn the relationship between momentary changes in the data – widely distributed brain activity patterns and the communication between brain regions – and link these to what the person actually reports feeling. HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Research 18 19 Professor Benjamin Becker Our technological advances now allow us to demonstrate that the brain basis of subjective feelings is indeed distinguishable from the more general bodily responses.
The Physical Toll of Antipsychotics history or other risk factors should make informed decisions with their doctor about monitoring and followup,” he said. Overall, both studies point to the need for doctors to consider their patients’ health after psychotic symptoms are under control, through monitoring and early detection, so nothing more serious happens to them. Professor Lai is now starting to replicate these studies in other populations, for instance, with insurance claims data from a private Japanese firm and other data from the UK. Hong Kong has been a strong starting point, though, because the data is highly reliable due to consistent standards and practices in the Hospital Authority and its dominant role in healthcare here. He also has funding to investigate drug interactions with Chinese medicine, in particular chai hu (bupleurum root), which is used in formulas for common illnesses such as cold and fever, as well as psychiatric symptoms. This is all unusual territory for the former economics student, who switched to public health in his postgraduate studies. “I think my non-clinical background gives me an advantage because I focus on things that a layman or patient might be concerned about,” he said. The study on prolactin-raising drugs, commonly used as antipsychotics, was also published in September 2025 in World Psychiatry. Using a dataset of more than 80,000 women in Hong Kong who were new users of antipsychotic medications, the team found prolactin-raising drugs nearly doubled the risk of gynaecological cancers to about one in 2,300. “It is still a pretty rare chance of having this cancer, and prolactinincreasing drugs are actually being phased out. But women with a family The results inspired the second study, published in September 2025 in The Lancet Psychiatry, where the team considered if the haematologic abnormalities they had seen in the blood cancer study – reduction in white blood cells – would weaken the immune system. This was confirmed, indicating that patients taking the drug had a higher infection risk. The risk was greatest among patients aged 55 or above. “Since clozapine may be the only option for patients, it would be unrealistic if we recommended against using it. But it might be appropriate to monitor a wider range of risks for this group. For instance, doctors could encourage vaccinations, try to detect symptoms earlier and encourage better infection prevention,” he said. Each of the recent studies uses large datasets to get a comprehensive picture. The side effects of clozapine are of particular interest because it is the only drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Professor Lai and his team looked at data from more than 10,000 patients with schizophrenia in Hong Kong for two studies of the drug. The first, published in late 2024, showed a slightly elevated risk for blood cancers such as leukaemia and lymphoma. It prompted the European Medicines Agency’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee to require pharmaceutical companies to submit additional safety data and update their product information in Europe. Holistic view needed Weakened immunity Patients with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, rely on long-term use of antipsychotic medications to control their condition. But concerns are growing that those same medications put patients at higher risk of other diseases. Confirmation has come from Professor Francisco Lai Tsztsun of HKUMed’s Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy, and the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Care, School of Clinical Medicine, who has led some of the largest investigations to date on the problem, involving data from tens of thousands of patients. Over the past 18 months, Professor Lai and his colleagues have shown that long-term use of the drug clozapine, effective for treatmentresistant schizophrenia, carries a 25 per cent higher risk of developing respiratory, gastrointestinal and other infections, and a slightly higher risk of developing blood cancers. Prolactin-raising drugs, meanwhile, double the risk of developing gynaecological cancers, although that risk is still rare. Previously, Professor Lai demonstrated in his PhD and postdoctoral work that women using antipsychotics had about a 32 per cent higher risk of ischemic heart disease compared with those who do not use the drugs. “Our goal is to interpret both relative and absolute risks in the clinical context and to provide actionable recommendations for monitoring and prevention, so patients can benefit from these effective medications while keeping potential risks within acceptable limits,” he said. “I’m also motivated by the overarching idea that a significant proportion of physical illnesses are preceded by mental illnesses. So if we have good interventions or early detections of mental health issues, we can address a lot of physical health problems.” Big data studies from HKUMed reveal how long-term use of antipsychotic drugs increases the risk of certain cancers and infections, flagging the need for more monitoring and preventive action. HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Research 20 21 If we have good interventions or early detections of mental health issues, we can address a lot of physical health problems. Professor Francisco Lai Tsz-tsun
According to the US-based ClinicalTrials.gov, more than 40,000 new clinical trials are launched globally each year. Few are required to address their environmental impacts, but these impacts are not minor. A single clinical trial on the effectiveness of dapagliflozin in reducing heart failure and death, for example, emitted about 2,500 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide through travel and other impacts – equivalent to the annual output of 500 cars. Health research is also contributing to the rapid increase in demand for energy-intensive computation and data centres, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and other impacts. Professor Chinmoy Sarkar has been investigating climate change and health from both ends of this conundrum. His recent health research with postdoctoral fellow Dr Ka Yan Lai and others traced the effects of temperature extremes on youth mental illness and general hospitalisations (see box). He is also part of a 16-member international study led by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the US National Academy of Medicine to consider the bigger picture of the sustainability of health research. “When we think about the climate costs on human health, for health research, it should be a matter of two-way accounting. We talk about climate change and its extremes that produce direct and indirect impacts on health. But our research in multiple health sectors also constitutes one of the human activities responsible for increasing greenhouse gases and the frequency and intensity of climate extremes,” he said. “We need to embed sustainability practices within research to reduce incurring an additional burden on our health.” The international report, For People, For Planet: Improving the Environmental Sustainability of Health Research, identifies six areas where greener practices could be introduced. One is data metrics and information and the need to better quantify environmental impacts. There is as yet no understanding of the overall carbon impact of health research, let alone other impacts such as waste and water, he said. Funding bodies could also promote sustainability by requiring researchers and institutions to meet minimum sustainability assessment criteria in order to secure grants. The regulatory and health research governance framework could also play a role by integrating greener standards into their processes – something Professor Sarkar believes could promote research innovation, such as the remote collection of study data via sensors and the shared use of data resources across institutions, as seen with the UK Biobank. The other three areas offer opportunities to improve environmental sustainability through better standards and training – procurement and supply chains, energyefficient physical infrastructure, including buildings and data centres, and capacity building among researchers. Professor Sarkar noted these measures were not all easily agreed upon by the report’s multidisciplinary authors and were subjected to intense debate and reflection before consensus was reached. One issue that stands out for him is concern about a two-tier system, where high-income institutions and countries have the resources to invest and comply with sustainability measures, but poorer ones do not. Flexibility and equitable support for capacity-building are therefore needed. In any case, the report is meant to be a wake-up call for the research community and practitioners. “We want to instil the fervour, start a discussion. Clinical and health research endeavours can risk-proof our health. But we need to do so in a way that is sustainable,” he said. Professor Chinmoy Sarkar We talk about climate change and its extremes that produce direct and indirect impacts on health. But our research in multiple health sectors also constitutes one of the human activities responsible for increasing greenhouse gases. HKU Bulletin | May 2026 Research 22 23 Professor Sarkar and Dr Lai had two studies published this year showing the effects of extreme and variable temperatures on human health, with some alarming results. A review in npj Mental Health Research, comprising 28 observational studies on heat exposure and mental health in more than 30,000 children and adolescents from 2007 to 2025, found that each one degree Celsius increase in ambient temperature was associated with a one per cent higher risk of suicide. Relative to low temperature, high temperature exposure was associated with a 12–18 per cent higher risk of hospitalisation for mental health disorders, schizophrenia, depression and all mental health conditions combined among 1.18 million individuals. The studies were conducted mostly in higherincome countries. “The evidence suggests the need for preventive interventions and heat action plans, but equally important is the need to gather evidence in lower-income countries, too,” he said. The findings of another empirical study published in Communications Medicine, comprising about 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank, plug a gap in quantifying associations between ambient temperature, temperature changes, and all hospitalisations. High summer temperatures were associated with more admissions for kidney and heat-related disorders. Mild winters were associated with more hospitalisations for any cause, particularly cardiovascular diseases, mental disorders and heat-related illness. Dr Lai said this may be attributed to modified health-seeking behaviours in milder winters and physiological responses among residents acclimatised to cold winters. The harm caused by weather extremes Pathways to greener research Scientific research is important for improving human health. Yet the studies themselves can have unmitigated environmental impacts that exacerbate health issues. Professor Chinmoy Sarkar of the Department of Urban Planning and Design is part of an international team raising the alarm on this problem. Health Research Takes a Carbon Toll
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