Early Days of Normalizing AI Use in a Doctoral Program

In this presentation, we share the AI use journey of four Ph.D. students in a Hospitality Management doctoral program. While the course syllabus included an AI use statement requesting transparency and reporting of prompt engineering and percentage use of the generative AI, students' actual use was initially cautious. Qualitative data analysis of students' AI transparency statements and postcourse reflections will be shared to inform best practices for programs with emergent use of AI in higher education. Given the unique roles of doctoral students in academia - combining researcher, future mentor, and future teacher- we posit that AI should not serve a transactional purpose, but instead play a transformative role in knowledge creation.