How Chatgpt Is Just a New Tool for Old Practices: The Democratization of Learning and Cheating Practices Among University Students through AI Chatbots

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT has caused widespread upheaval in the higher education sector. University students can use these chatbots for refining their writing, finding literature, obtaining feedback, brainstorming topics, and producing text. The growing use of such tools in higher education has sparked much debate about the opportunities and challenges they present. A significant concern has been how AI chatbots can be utilized to cheat in assignments, exams, etc.

One core assumption underlying the debate is that AI chatbots have indeed yielded completely novel possibilities of learning and cheating. We challenge this assumption. Drawing on a dataset of focus group interviews with 61 university students we outline students’ different practices of AI chatbot usage including different forms of cheating. For each of these practices we discuss to what degree they mirror or differ from practices that already existed before the introduction of AI chatbots.

We will show that none of the possibilities that AI chatbots offer – be it as learning and writing support, as a tutor, or for cheating – is indeed novel. Every type of learning, writing or cheating practice that involve AI chatbots, has existed before. However, in the past, many possibilities of supporting learning and writing, and of cheating (e.g., ghostwriting) were only available to highly privileged students possessing sufficient amounts of capital to leverage such possibilities. In this respect, AI chatbots have merely brought a democratization of options.

We conclude that widespread concerns about potentials for academic dishonesty cannot be explained by the alleged novelty of possibilities that AI chatbots offer. Instead, the democratization of means to successfully cheat appear to be the cause of the widespread concerns. Thus, these widespread concerns revolving around cheating with AI chatbots exhibit the underlying structural discriminations of underprivileged students with limited capital.