AIGC Enabling the Teaching of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Vocational Undergraduate Civics Courses: Value Implications, Challenges and Practical Paths ()
1. Introduction
Generative Artificial Intelligence (or AIGC for short) refers to generative AI technologies, which are models and related technologies that have the ability to generate content such as text, images, audio, and video [1]. From the U.S. Open AI company developed AIGC—Chat GPT, to Baidu, Aliyun and other companies have developed WenxinYiyan, TongyiQianwen, Doubao, etc., and then to the beginning of 2025 deepseek’s popularity, which set off a AIGC research boom. Vocational undergraduate education cultivates highly educated and highly skilled personnel, breaking vocational education to stop at the specialized level of skills transfer, and strengthening the content of new and high technology. It follows the law of vocational education and reaches the level of undergraduate education. With the rapid development of vocational undergraduate colleges and universities and the continuous prosperity of vocational education, the teaching of vocational undergraduate ideological and political theory class (referred to as vocational undergraduate Civics and Political Science Class Teaching) has received more and more attention. The teaching of vocational undergraduate ideological and political courses refers to the ideological and political theory courses conducted in vocational undergraduate colleges and universities, such as Basic Principles of Marxism, Outline of Modern Chinese History, Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought and Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Introduction to Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, Ideology, Morality and the Rule of Law, and Situation and Policies. These courses uphold the teaching philosophy of establishing morality and nurturing people, and the teaching objective is to cultivate socialist successors who have both moral and technical skills and who serve socialism.
Since the establishment of the first batch of higher vocational undergraduate courses in China in 2019, the status of vocational undergraduate education has become more and more prominent, and at the same time, it has given rise to the need for theoretical research on vocational undergraduate civic and political education. The theoretical studies searching for “vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics” on China Knowledge Network have been emerging, especially in the past two years, there is a trend of dramatic growth, and the existing studies mainly focus on the new characteristics, problems and challenges, teaching innovation countermeasures and suggestions of vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics courses [2] [3], but focus on the impact of artificial intelligence on the teaching of vocational undergraduate education, but there are few studies focusing on the empowerment of AI on vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics courses. In 2021, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Promoting the High-Quality Development of Modern Vocational Education, which emphasized, “Improving the quality and effectiveness of ideological and political theory classes promoting the deep integration of modern information technology and education teaching, and improving classroom teaching quality” [4]. In 2025, the Outline of the Plan for the Construction of a Stronger Education State (2024-2035) proposes “opening up a new track of development and shaping a new advantage in development by digitizing education” and “promoting artificial intelligence to help transform education” [5]. This important exposition signals the reality of AIGC empowering the teaching of vocational undergraduate civics courses in the Greater Bay Area.
Based on the characteristics of vocational education in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao, this paper explores the empowerment of AIGC on the teaching of vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics courses in the Greater Bay Area, with the hope of elucidating the value implications, challenges, and practical paths.
2. The Value Implications of AIGC Enabling the Teaching of
Vocational Undergraduate Civics Courses
AIGC is a technology that uses algorithms, models, and rules to automate the creation and generation of a wide range of content such as text, images, sound, video, and code, which has features such as strong intelligence and strong scalability, and with a large language model as a base. It possesses deep thinking, language understanding and generative capabilities similar to those of the human brain, language understanding and generation capabilities. Since vocational education in Hong Kong and Macao is currently at the specialized level, vocational undergraduate colleges and universities in the Greater Bay Area are mainly concentrated in Guangdong Province.
AIGC is empowered by technology to improve the stereotype of boring and tasteless teaching in traditional Civics classes, enhance the teaching efficiency of Civics classes, deepen the effect of Civics education, and at the same time fit the characteristics of industry-teaching integration of vocational undergraduate education, which is mainly embodied in the following aspects.
2.1. Accurate Education: Enhance the Teaching Effect of
Personalized Civics Class
Empowered by AIGC, which accurately analyzes students’ online learning behaviors, accurately identifies students’ preferred cases and topics, and predicts students’ pre-existing cognitive level and their knowledge and thought confusion points, this intelligent analysis of learning can provide teachers with personalized teaching design solutions. AIGC can promote students’ adaptive learning. Adaptive Learning (Adaptive Learning) as a use of computers as a means of educational technology, according to each student’s individual characteristics and unique needs, the allocation of human and media resources for the arrangement of educational methods. AIGC is empowered to provide customized education to students with different personality traits and different grade levels, students of different majors to push customized learning resources. For example, cases for craftsmanship and micro-classes for professional ethics are designed to realize tailor-made teaching and avoid one-size-fits-all traditional fill-in-the-blank teaching indoctrination. AIGC technology and algorithmic recommendation can improve the precision, temperature and breadth of the teaching of undergraduate vocational civics courses in the Greater Bay Area, and can “precisely feed” students the civics content they are interested in according to their “personality profiles”, which can help to enhance the fit with the objectives and knowledge of the teaching.
2.2. Scenario-Based Experience: Creating an Immersive Teaching
Scene
AIGC is accelerating educational change [6]. Generative AI technology and VR/AR technology build career scenario-based Civics scenarios, for example, for students majoring in AI, who are going to be senior engineers in the future, according to the professional and occupational characteristics of this student, the Civics teacher, empowered by AI technology, simulates the technical and ethical choices faced by senior engineers in their work practice, and sets up similar scenarios, so that the students can, in their embodied experiences Understanding Abstract Theory. The empowerment of AIGC technology and AI digital human technology can resurrect Qian Xuesen and have a dialog with students, which not only enhances the interest of the classroom, but also allows students to feel the great man’s message in the dialog, so that they can pay practical actions in real-life learning. Teaching Intelligent Body and Intelligent Learning Companion create an immersive teaching scene.
2.3. Vocational Integration: Improving the Efficiency and Resource
Optimization of Civics Teaching
Marx pointed out that “Nature has made no machines … they are the product of human labor … they are objectified intellectual forces” [7]. As can be seen from this exposition of Marx, AIGC, as a labor tool, is both a practical intermediary for human beings to transform the world and an intelligent tool to enhance the creativity of the human brain, and at the same time, it is a wisdom-driven engine for the teaching of vocational undergraduate civics courses in the Greater Bay Area. the accurate analysis of big data and multiple models based on generative AI improves the output efficacy of the teaching content of vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics courses. It can process and fuse data from different modalities, combine classical textual discourses with drawings, cases, and events, and provide vocational undergraduate Civics courses with rich cases in areas such as great national craftsmen. When highlighting the vocational characteristics of vocational undergraduate Civics courses, teachers of Civics courses make full use of AIGC to track the hot-spots of the times, social trends, technological advances in real time, and the development of the Bay Area, to screen, analyze, and integrate the latest materials, and to ensure that the contents of the teaching content are characteristic of vocational education, cutting-edge, and up-to-date with the times.
3. Problems and Challenges Facing the Teaching of
Vocational Undergraduate Civics Classes Empowered by
AIGC
Some scholars have focused on the whole education field and analyzed the impact of Chat GPT on the education field from the dimensions of application value, potential risks, and governance path [6] [8] [9], etc. There are also many potential risks and practical problems at the value premise, technical limits, and specific operation level, such as privacy protection and ideological security risks, the loss of educational subjectivity, the digitization of educational relations, and the lack of specialized talents [10], while empowering the teaching of vocational undergraduate civics courses in the Bay Area:
3.1. Subjectivity Lost
AIGC, as a tool for the development of subjectivity, is not only an extension of the inorganic body of human beings, but also a contemporary manifestation of technical rationality in the age of digital intelligence. The accelerated conquest and transformation of the external world by the instrumental superiority of AIGC has led to the division and antagonism between the pursuit of high-efficiency technological rationality and the cultivation of ideological and political values focusing on internal enhancement, and distorted the connotation of “subjectivity” focusing on the cultivation of values into the connotation of “for-me” in the pursuit of high-efficiency and high-speed. The connotation of “subjectivity” focusing on value cultivation is distorted into the connotation of “egoism” pursuing high efficiency and speed. Although AIGC has profoundly changed the shape of education and life, and improved the efficiency of the dissemination of ideological discourse; however, in the process of using it, both educators and educated people, their dependence on intelligent tools has deepened, and the passive basis of their subjective initiative has been dissolved, and AIGC has weakened the autonomy, planning, and purposefulness of human initiative while empowering the dissemination of ideological discourse. It makes subjectivity and subjective autonomy gradually obscured.
3.2. Discourse Loss
The traditional dissemination carriers of ideological and political discourse mainly rely on the official media and school teachers. In the era of digital intelligence, located in the front line of reform and opening up and the economically developed Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Greater Bay Area, the dissemination carrier of the ideological discourse of vocational undergraduates has been transformed from a single, traditional channel to a diversified, digital-intelligent channel, which also implies that the power of discourse sinks, which, although it can increase the efficiency of the teaching of the ideological class, at the same time implies the weakening of the centre of the power of the ideological discourse. The characteristics of vocational undergraduate students lie in the fact that they are partial to technical application, and their theoretical knowledge is weak in systematicity. Although generative artificial intelligence may become a wisdom engine for the teaching of vocational undergraduate civic and political classes, this kind of technological generation of text content and decentralised content generation and transmission is very likely to cause the weakening of the subjective authority of educators, weakening the seriousness of the classroom knowledge transfer, and also is not conducive to the complete construction of the students’ knowledge structure, and is not beneficial to the emotional establishment of teachers and students in the classroom. The empowerment of AI to the ideological and political classroom faces the problem of the erosion of the emotional value of the subject’s participation in the creation of the object discourse.
3.3. Ideological Worries
The content generation of AIGC can neither trace the source of information, mixing real and false information, while its understanding of linguistic content is insufficient, relying only on algorithms to mechanically match key times, ignoring context and position. On one hand, on the technical level, AI is unable to distinguish between true and false information, and its lack of understanding of semantics can easily lead to the output of erroneous content; on the other hand, when students are exposed to this erroneous content input, it is very easy to reinforce students’ false cognition and destroy the existing cognitive structure, which makes their theoretical cognitive frameworks and value frameworks suffer from the impact of the students. The combination of these two aspects may strengthen the Civic Education object’s false cognition of mainstream socialist ideology and destroy the object’s already formed cognitive structure in line with the mainstream ideology. Especially in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which is located in the front line of reform and opening up, the front line of high-tech technology development, and an economically developed region, there is a hidden struggle with the ideology of Western capitalism while competing with the hard power of science and technology. UNESCO had held a global meeting of education ministers to explore the opportunities, challenges and risks that AI applications pose to education systems. Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education, said, “Generative AI opens up new horizons and challenges for education. But we urgently need to take action to ensure that new AI technologies are integrated into education on the terms we set. As stated in the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which was unanimously adopted by Member States, we have a responsibility to prioritize safety, inclusion, diversity, transparency and quality.”
The path of ideological risk transmission is: technological defect—content distortion—cognitive confusion—structural damage. Behind the seeming objectivity and reliability, generative artificial intelligence hides the value bias of the “invisible hand”, and the Western-dominated technological hegemony can use the big model to generate content with the ideological tendency of Western capitalism, so as to infiltrate students’ thoughts. Especially in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which is located in the front line of reform and opening up, the front line of high-tech technology development, and an economically developed area, there is a hidden struggle with the ideology of Western capitalism while competing with the hard power of science and technology. In addition, AI’s instant feedback mechanism tends to make students equate values discussions with ordinary knowledge quizzes, weakening the depth of ideological exchanges that characterise vocational undergraduate Civics courses.
3.4. Technology Dependence and the Risk of Data Privacy Breaches
While AIGC provides convenience to teachers and students, it also makes them have fewer opportunities to think independently. Whether it is teachers preparing lessons, intelligently analysing the learning situation, retrieving cases in the Bay Area, or students thinking about pre-course, in-course and post-course issues according to the teaching arrangement, the empowerment of AIGC can improve efficiency on the one hand, but on the other hand, it may lead to technological dependence of teachers and students, eliminating initiative, subjectivity and creativity. In the teaching process, if teachers and students rely too much on and overuse AIGC, it is easy to weaken the emotional connection between teachers and students. Once students rely on the interpretation of AIGC’s responses and do not trust the knowledge imparted in the classroom, the subjective position of the educator is weakened, which is not conducive to the construction of a good and harmonious interaction between teachers and students emotionally. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain the balance of teacher-led-AI-assisted. In addition, there may be a risk of data privacy leakage during the teaching process using AIGC. AIGC is like a double-edged sword, which can bring benefits in the process of using it, but at the same time, it is also easy to cause data privacy leakage, which is due to the reason that the current intelligent technology is still immature.
4. The Practical Path of AIGC Enabling the Teaching of
Vocational Undergraduate Civics Courses in the Greater
Bay Area
The impact of AI on Civic Education is viewed negatively, as posing more challenges than opportunities for Civic Education [11]. However, responding to the challenge of AI on vocational undergraduate ideology and politics courses is by no means a simple matter of resisting or passively adapting to it, but rather a change of active leadership and in-depth reconfiguration. The goal is to cultivate “new men of the times” who not only master advanced technical skills, but also have firm ideals and beliefs, high professional ethics, a strong sense of social responsibility, and are able to master and lead the era of intelligence. To achieve this goal, we need to circumvent the risks and challenges posed by AI to the teaching of vocational undergraduate civics and politics courses in the Greater Bay Area, and we can do it from the following aspects. We can start from the following aspects:
4.1. Value Leadership: Adhere to the Guidance of Marxism
Dialectical materialism reveals us that everything in the world is in a state of change, we deeply realize that technological change and AI wave are the change of the times, but the fundamental task of the ideological class to establish moral education and the core objective of guiding students to establish a correct world view and life view and values will not change, we need to look at the unity of opposites of change and unchanging dialectically, and answer the realistic question of how to make use of the new technology to better achieve the goal of establishing morality and educating people. We also need to answer the question of how to use new technologies to better realize the goal of promoting moral education. Emphasize that technological development must serve human well-being and cannot be divorced from the leadership of humanism and socialist core values. Ensure that vocational undergraduate Civics discourse in the Greater Bay Area is always in line with the trend of historical development, does not deviate from the direction of socialism, and is wary of the intrusion of erroneous social trends, such as historical nihilism and cybercultural consumerism, so as to ensure that the teaching of vocational undergraduate Civics courses is red and noble. Therefore, Marxist guidance needs to be maintained at all times.
Firstly, in close conjunction with the positioning of vocational undergraduate education as “application-oriented” and “technical-skill-oriented” talent cultivation and future employment areas (such as intelligent manufacturing, new energy vehicles, etc.), we have integrated the impact of AI on specific industries and positions (such as human-computer collaboration mode, changes in skill demand, and new challenges to occupational ethics) into the teaching content as vivid cases, and also integrated the ethical dilemmas, social impact, impact on employment structure, data privacy, algorithmic bias and other topics brought about by AI development into the content system of Civics and Politics. The impact of AI on specific industries and positions (e.g. human-machine collaboration mode, changes in skills demand, new challenges in professional ethics) is integrated into the teaching content as vivid cases, and the ethical dilemmas brought by the development of AI, social impact, impact on employment structure, data privacy, algorithmic bias and other topics are also deeply integrated into the content system of Civics and Political Science courses, so as to guide the students to understand the development of science and technology and set up a correct outlook on science and technology, labour and career.
Secondly, teachers prejudge and analyse new types of ethical issues (fairness, responsibility, privacy) brought about by AI application scenarios (e.g. algorithmic recommendation, automatic driving, intelligent medical treatment), and strengthen the education of professional ethics and awareness of the rule of law. Focusing on the characteristics of the AI era and the future development needs of vocational undergraduate students, they face the challenges and solve the doubts. Emphasise the importance of core qualities such as lifelong learning ability, critical thinking, innovative thinking, interpersonal communication and collaboration in the context of accelerated iteration of digital technology, and guide students to make good career planning.
4.2. Human-Computer Synergy: Construct a Teaching Mode of
Symbiosis between Reality and Human-Computer Synergy
The main body of Civics education should actively analyze the underlying algorithmic technology of AIGC, construct a positive Civics dissemination and acceptance mechanism, improve the information protection technology and mechanism, and build a teaching model of virtual-real symbiosis and human-machine collaboration. First, to improve the digital literacy level of teachers of vocational undergraduate Civics courses. Teachers need to become value leaders who make good use of technology, guides of higher-order thinking and providers of humanistic care. The soul of the classroom lies in the deep, warm interaction and thought collision between teachers and students, and between students and students, and the establishment of a deep, virtuous circle teacher-student relationship through eye contact, emotional resonance, and personalized care, which cannot be replaced by machines. Teachers of Civics and Political Science class discuss in depth the value of human creative labor, the new connotation of craftsmanship, and how to deal with the relationship between human beings and machines in the age of AI, so that students can realize that machines are used for human beings rather than human beings being replaced by machines, and realize that machines are tools rather than dominating human beings. The core value of Civics lies in its humanity, value leadership, emotional interaction and critical thinking cultivation, which are difficult to be replaced by AIGC. Moreover, AIGC essentially belongs to instrumental rationality, which is qualitatively different from value rationality. Instrumental rationality and value rationality are united rather than divided and opposed. The core value of the Civics class is “educating people”, and AI is a powerful “teaching assistant”. Teachers of Civics and Political Science in vocational undergraduate programs should make good use of the tools to build a “human-technology unity” of the wisdom of teachers.
4.3. Ecological Synergy: Government, Schools, Technology
Providers and Other Parties Work Together to Build a Digital
Wisdom and Political Ecology
Firstly, the government and relevant management departments improve the regulatory system of AIGC technology. In order to avoid risks, it is necessary to improve the construction of relevant laws and regulations and systems to ensure the accuracy of the content of the dissemination of the ideological discourse, the scientificity of the expression, and the clarity of the value orientation, and to promote the production effectiveness and precise communication of the content of the ideological discourse of vocational undergraduates in the Greater Bay Area.
Secondly, the school has increased investment in the construction of intelligent classrooms and intelligent teaching platforms; and improved incentive mechanisms to encourage teachers to explore AI+ Civics teaching. Invite industry experts, especially engineers engaged in AI research and development applications, into the classroom to share frontline experience and the demand for talent literacy. Organize students to visit cutting-edge enterprises in AI application to understand the ethical and value issues in actual scenarios.
Thirdly, enterprise researchers and developers combine the characteristics of the Bay Area and the vocational characteristics of vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics courses to develop teaching scenarios of vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics courses with Bay Area characteristics and to connect all kinds of digital applications. Both the vocational education discipline resource database, the Communist Party of China ideological and theoretical resource database, the Great Civics Course resource database, the Guangdong vocational wisdom education public service platform and other excellent resources and wisdom platforms should be implanted into the vocational undergraduate Civics and Politics big model; also relying on the generative artificial intelligence and the user’s dialogue will be replied to in the form of timely download of the information and views in the form of learning materials documents, to facilitate after the fact It should also rely on generative artificial intelligence to download the reply information and opinions in the form of learning materials in a timely manner in the form of documents in the dialog with the users to facilitate after-action checking, verification and consolidation, and provide a port for feedback from the users.
Fourthly, technology providers not only adhere to Marxist guidance in content input, but also need to establish artificial intelligence machine awareness corresponding to vocational undergraduate civic education in terms of technology provision. Technology developers not only need to effectively control risks at the source of technology, but also, to ensure that the content is true and reliable and in line with mainstream values, need to develop new technologies that enable machines to filter bad data, weed out inappropriate speech, and remove deeply false information through technical means such as data identification, root tracing, and content monitoring. The identification, monitoring and removal of data exclusion also need to be corrected and optimized to ensure that the socialist core values in the human-machine dialogue are correct, compliant, legal, in line with the development of the times, and in line with the mainstream values of the society, so that the vocational undergraduate ideology data model always adheres to the socialist core values, and to better realize the human-machine value alignment. Of course, it is necessary to keep abreast of the times, constantly input, update, and train the Bay Area Intelligent Civics Database, strengthen the core technology, and optimize the updating and iteration of the algorithmic model of vocational undergraduate Civics in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao Bay Area.
5. Conclusion
In summary, AIGC empowered Bay Area vocational undergraduate civics class is a far-reaching educational change, which opens up new horizons for the innovation of the civics class in colleges and universities in the new era. The empowerment of technology is not all-powerful and all-good, and it also faces risks, problems and challenges. We can only guide the technology to be good and adhere to the unity of value rationality and instrumental rationality in order to realize the benign interaction between machine technology and Civic and Political Education for Moral and Humanistic Education, and inject a strong impetus to cultivate the great master craftsmen and skilled craftsmen who are in the service of socialism.
Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by Shenzhen Polytechnic University General Project of Teaching Quality Project “Research on the Teaching Path of Basic Principles of Marxism in Vocational Undergraduate Programs with Special Characteristics in the Bay Area by Integrating Shenzhen Red Culture” (2025), Shenzhen Polytechnic University Quality Engineering Program Undergraduate Basic Principles of Marxism Course Joint Teaching and Research Room Construction Project (2025).