ChatGPT and the digitisation of writing

Abstract

The aim of this study is to uncover how students’ practices of writing in higher education are being impacted by ChatGPT. The use of ChatGPT and other generative AI needs to be set in the context of a longer-term process of the digitisation of writing, where many tools are being employed by students to support writing because it is a complex iterative process. Generative AI appears to have had a large impact on how students write, and we propose a model of generative AI literacy to assess their capabilities in doing so. Semi-structured interviews and observation data were collected at a British University with 23 students from diverse backgrounds, including the UK, USA, China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. The data was analysed thematically. It was found that students used ChatGPT alongside many other tools, and in rather individualistic ways often to address specific challenges they felt they had with writing. Their main concerns were around plagiarism, information inaccuracy and technology dependence. There was a relatively weak understanding or interest in the ethical issues around the exploitative and environmental impacts of generative AI. The social controversy around ChatGPT can be seen as a useful opportunity to engage students in a discussion about the digitisation of writing and promote AI literacy in this context.

Emerging technologies and higher education libraries: a bibliometric analysis of the global literature

“…This is also evident in Author Collaboration -Figures 9 and 11 in which Cox a leading author from the Global North has engaged with academicians from the Global South to publish on the topic. Further, reviewed literature affirms the findings presented in Figures 9 and 11, wherein, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, digital writing, virtual services and research data management in higher education libraries are explored by Cox and academicians from the Global South (Huang et al, 2021(Huang et al, , 2023Li and Cox, 2021;Singh et al, 2023;Zhao et al, 2023Zhao et al, , 2024.…”