Can GenAI Communicate? University Students' Views on Generative Language and Image Models

The paper reviews the possibilities of human-GenAI communication based on classical communication paradigms. It then investigates the attitude of university students towards GenAI by interviewing engineering and teacher training students using an online questionnaire. The responses show that 40% of the teacher training students attribute intent to GenAI, one third fear that it will take away their work, while they also responded in the majority, that there are human-specific activities, such as the arts or communicating God's word, that AI cannot convey. Engineering students are much less afraid that Gen AI will take away their work, they can look at GenAI with a more user-centric attitude. They consider music to be algorithmizable, they think therefore can be mediated by AI or a robot. Also a quarter of them acknowledge that in the interaction between humans and AI, the human is the ethical regulator who should monitor the machine's actions.