University students’ perceptions of learning with generative artificial intelligence

The rapid development of chatbots undergirded by large language models calls for teachers and students to explore using chatbots in educational ways. Given this new phenomenon, education researchers need to explore students’ responses to chatbots to comprehensively understand their experiences. This study adopted purposive sampling to interview Taiwanese university students (N = 17) who had used ChatGPT for a semester in an open elective course. Transcripts were analyzed using the grounded theory approach. Findings indicate that while the challenges posed by ChatGPT perturbed the students, their actual interactions with the chatbot revealed that it lacks some vital epistemic aspects. ChatGPT cannot discern what is true, and cannot experience the world as humans do. Hence, while it could assist humans in some epistemic endeavors, the students concluded that they need to assume epistemic agency in its use. The findings imply that educators may need to design academic tasks that further develop undergraduates’ epistemic agency for the critical and creative use of chatbot-generated artifacts.