Exploring Students’ Attitudes Toward Generative Artificial Intelligence Through the Use of ChatGPT: A Qualitative Study in Higher Education
Abstract
The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into higher education has sparked contrasting reactions, ranging from technological enthusiasm to ethical concerns. This study aims to qualitatively and interpretatively examine higher education students’ attitudes towards using ChatGPT in academic settings. Based on semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of students and an in-depth semantic analysis of the transcripts, fourteen key variables were identified and grouped into three overarching dimensions: techno-cognitive, academic-pragmatic, and axiological-ethical. The findings reveal ambivalent attitudes shaped by the lack of institutional regulation, performance-driven logic, and individual moral frameworks. This research proposes a conceptual model that expands traditional technology acceptance frameworks by incorporating normative, emotional, and identity-based dimensions. Beyond its empirical contribution, the study underscores the urgency of implementing a critical and ethically grounded pedagogical framework for using AI in higher education.
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Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2019). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Mithu, B., & Kumar, A. C. (2024). Artificial intelligence in education: Understanding benefits, limitations, and prospects for the future. International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2024.v06i02.16699
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Razouki, H., Cherradi, B., Hair, A., & Razouki, A. (2025). L’impact de l’intelligence artificielle sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage : Enjeux et perspectives. SHS Web of Conferences, 214, 01010. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202521401010
Resnik, D. B. (2018). The ethics of research with human subjects (Vol. 74). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68756-8
Ricoeur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre. Seuil.
Santos, H., Batista, J., & Marques, R. P. (2019). Digital transformation in higher education: The use of communication technologies by students. Procedia Computer Science, 164, 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.12.163
Selwyn, N. (2016). Education and technology: Key issues and debates (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474235952
Smutny, P., & Schreiberova, P. (2020). Chatbots for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the Facebook Messenger. Computers & Education, 151, 103862. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103862
Son, T., Yeo, S., & Lee, D. (2024). Exploring elementary preservice teachers’ responsive teaching in mathematics through an artificial intelligence-based chatbot. Teaching and Teacher Education, 146, 104640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2024.104640
Susnjak, T. (2024). Beyond predictive learning analytics modelling and onto explainable artificial intelligence with prescriptive analytics and ChatGPT. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 34(2), 452–482. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-023-00336-3
Tlili, A., Shehata, B., Adarkwah, M. A., Bozkurt, A., Hickey, D. T., Huang, R., & Agyemang, B. (2023). What if the devil is my guardian angel: ChatGPT as a case study of using chatbots in education. Smart Learning Environments, 10(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00237-x
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS’17). Curran Associates Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA, 6000–6010. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3295222.3295349
Venkatesh, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. D. (2003). User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view. MIS Quarterly, 27(3), 425–478. https://doi.org/10.2307/30036540
Walter, O., Shenaar-Golan, V., & Greenberg, Z. (2015). Effect of short-term intervention program on academic self-efficacy in higher education. Psychology, 6(10), 1199–1215. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2015.610118
Zawacki-Richter, O., Marín, V. I., Bond, M., & Gouverneur, F. (2019). Systematic review of research on artificial intelligence applications in higher education – where are the educators? International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 16(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0171-0
Zhai, X. (2022). ChatGPT user experience: Implications for education. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4312418
Ali, O., Murray, P. A., Momin, M., Dwivedi, Y. K., & Malik, T. (2024). The effects of artificial intelligence applications in educational settings: Challenges and strategies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 199, 123076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2023.123076
Baidoo-Anu, D., & Owusu Ansah, L. (2023). Education in the era of generative artificial intelligence (AI): Understanding the potential benefits of ChatGPT in promoting teaching and learning. Journal of AI, 7(1), 52-62. https://doi.org/10.61969/jai.1337500
Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of self-regulation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 248–287. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90022-L
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J. D., Dhariwal, P., Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., Agarwal, S., Herbert-Voss, A., Krueger, G., Henighan, T., Child, R., Ramesh, A., Ziegler, D. M., Wu, J., Winter, C., … Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. In Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) (pp. 1877–1901). Curran Associates, Inc. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.14165
Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/249008
Droui, M., & Oudrhiri, M. (2023, November). Usages pédagogiques des dispositifs mobiles dans un contexte universitaire marocain. Association EPI (Enseignement Public et Informatique).
Dwivedi, Y. K., Hughes, L., Ismagilova, E., Aarts, G., Coombs, C., Crick, T., Duan, Y., Dwivedi, R., Edwards, J., Eirug, A., Galanos, V., Ilavarasan, P. V., Janssen, M., Jones, P., Kar, A. K., Kizgin, H., Kronemann, B., Lal, B., Lucini, B., … Williams, M. D. (2021). Artificial intelligence (AI): Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy. International Journal of Information Management, 57, 101994. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.08.002
Floridi, L. (Ed.). (2021). Ethics, governance, and policies in artificial intelligence (Vol. 144). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81907-1
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine.
Holmes, W., Persson, J., Chounta, I.-A., & Wasson, B. (2022). Artificial intelligence and education: A critical view through the lens of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Council of Europe Publishing.
Ji, Z., Lee, N., Frieske, R, Yu, T., Su, D., Xu, Y., Ishii, E., Bang, Y. J., Madotto, A., & Fung, P. (2023). Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation. ACM Comput. Surv. 55, 12, Article 248 (December 2023), 38 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571730
Jobin, A., Ienca, M., & Vayena, E. (2019). The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(9), 389–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2
Jun, S., Kim, L., Han, K. J., Bang, S., Kim, B., & Han, J. (2024). Integrating IoT, AI, and robotics for enhanced learning experiences at Neulbom School in Korea. In Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE 4th International Conference on Electronic Communications, Internet of Things and Big Data (ICEIB) (pp. 470–472). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEIB61477.2024.10602679
Kasneci, E., Sessler, K., Küchemann, S., Bannert, M., Dementieva, D., Fischer, F., Gasser, U., Groh, G., Günnemann, S., Hüllermeier, E., Krusche, S., Kutyniok, G., Michaeli, T., Nerdel, C., Pfeffer, J., Poquet, O., Sailer, M., Schmidt, A., Seidel, T., … Kasneci, G. (2023). ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education. Learning and Individual Differences, 103, 102274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2023.102274
Kaufmann, J.-C. (2016). L’entretien compréhensif (4e éd.). Armand Colin.
Latif, E., Mai, G., Nyaaba, M., Wu, X., Liu, N., Lu, G., Li, S., Liu, T., & Zhai, X. (2023). Artificial general intelligence (AGI) for education [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.12479
Lee, D., Huh, Y., Lin, C.-Y., & Reigeluth, C. M. (2018). Technology functions for personalized learning in learner-centered schools. Educational Technology Research and Development, 66(5), 1269–1302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9615-9
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Lu, C., Lu, C., Lange, R. T., Foerster, J., Clune, J., & Ha, D. (2024). The AI scientist: Toward fully automated open-ended scientific discovery [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.06292
Luckin, R., Cukurova, M., Kent, C., & du Boulay, B. (2022). Empowering educators to be AI-ready. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 3, 100076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2022.100076
Mhlanga, D. (2023). Open AI in Education, the Responsible and Ethical Use of ChatGPT Towards Lifelong Learning. In: FinTech and Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37776-1_17
Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2019). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Mithu, B., & Kumar, A. C. (2024). Artificial intelligence in education: Understanding benefits, limitations, and prospects for the future. International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2024.v06i02.16699
Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., Mishkin, P., Zhang, C., Agarwal, S., Slama, K., Ray, A., Schulman, J., Hilton, J., Kelton, F., Miller, L. E., Simens, M., Askell, A., Welinder, P., Christiano, P. F., Leike, J., & Lowe, R. J. (2022). Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.02155
Patton, M. Q. (2015). Qualitative research & evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Razouki, H., Cherradi, B., Hair, A., & Razouki, A. (2025). L’impact de l’intelligence artificielle sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage : Enjeux et perspectives. SHS Web of Conferences, 214, 01010. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202521401010
Resnik, D. B. (2018). The ethics of research with human subjects (Vol. 74). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68756-8
Ricoeur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre. Seuil.
Santos, H., Batista, J., & Marques, R. P. (2019). Digital transformation in higher education: The use of communication technologies by students. Procedia Computer Science, 164, 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.12.163
Selwyn, N. (2016). Education and technology: Key issues and debates (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474235952
Smutny, P., & Schreiberova, P. (2020). Chatbots for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the Facebook Messenger. Computers & Education, 151, 103862. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103862
Son, T., Yeo, S., & Lee, D. (2024). Exploring elementary preservice teachers’ responsive teaching in mathematics through an artificial intelligence-based chatbot. Teaching and Teacher Education, 146, 104640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2024.104640
Susnjak, T. (2024). Beyond predictive learning analytics modelling and onto explainable artificial intelligence with prescriptive analytics and ChatGPT. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 34(2), 452–482. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-023-00336-3
Tlili, A., Shehata, B., Adarkwah, M. A., Bozkurt, A., Hickey, D. T., Huang, R., & Agyemang, B. (2023). What if the devil is my guardian angel: ChatGPT as a case study of using chatbots in education. Smart Learning Environments, 10(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00237-x
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS’17). Curran Associates Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA, 6000–6010. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3295222.3295349
Venkatesh, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. D. (2003). User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view. MIS Quarterly, 27(3), 425–478. https://doi.org/10.2307/30036540
Walter, O., Shenaar-Golan, V., & Greenberg, Z. (2015). Effect of short-term intervention program on academic self-efficacy in higher education. Psychology, 6(10), 1199–1215. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2015.610118
Zawacki-Richter, O., Marín, V. I., Bond, M., & Gouverneur, F. (2019). Systematic review of research on artificial intelligence applications in higher education – where are the educators? International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 16(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0171-0
Zhai, X. (2022). ChatGPT user experience: Implications for education. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4312418
Machkour, B., & Abriane, A. (2026). Exploring Students’ Attitudes Toward Generative Artificial Intelligence Through the Use of ChatGPT: A Qualitative Study in Higher Education. ADCAIJ: Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal, 14, e33461. https://doi.org/10.14201/adcaij.33461
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