What do students use AI tools for? Assessing students’ use of AI tools in three typical study related scenarios

In recent years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful, but also highly controversial, tool in higher education. While there are in-depth debates about the ethics and regulation of the use of generative AI, discussions about the actual use cases for which students use AI are much more limited. This paper presents an empirical case study based on a survey (realised sample n=110; response rate: ~ 80%) at a medium-sized Austrian university. The analysis shows that about 20% will definitely use AI tools for writing term papers, about 30 to 35% will use AI for preparing exams and poster presentations. Alarmingly, in regression models, knowledge of AI had no statistically significant influence on whether students considered using AI or not - the decision is mostly influenced by one's enthusiasm for AI.