The Ethical Ghostwriter?: Demystifying How Students Use Generative AI in Writing

There is a conflicting cultural discourse about the use of AI in higher education. On the one hand, enthusiasts like Ethan Mollick and Mary Meeker suggest that AI will revolutionize higher education by changing the way that students learn. On the other hand, skeptics like John Warner and Nick Bostrom suggest that generative AI could lead to devaluing higher education and a loss of student ability to master fundamental skills. We believe that neither side is fully correct, and that the reality lies somewhere in between. In this paper our faculty/student collaborative research group will describe how we used a mixed methods approach to test both student perception of the ethicality and effectiveness of using generative AI for the writing process, a dimension of education that is seen as most “at-risk” with the growing ubiquity of generative AI. We will discuss the results of our campus-wide survey and follow up interviews along with a multi-classroom experiment designed from the results of this preliminary work. Our aim is to demystify how students are actually using generative AI as a collaborative partner show students where it is an effective and ethical choice for their educational growth.