"ChatGPT, Review This Message to My Prof" Investigating Students' Use of AI for Online Communication in Academic Settings

Abstract

Students communicate with diverse recipients across multiple text-based channels in academic settings. As students increasingly use AI to compose and revise messages, AI introduces a new element into the communication process that existing communication frameworks have not fully accounted for. To understand why and how students use AI for online communication and how they perceive its impact, we conducted two-phase interviews with 12 students: first, participants mapped their online communication into recipient-channel groups (e.g., “instructor over school email”) and indicated their level of AI use for each group; then, they described selected groups in depth. In this poster, we present preliminary findings on when students use AI based on 110 recipient-channel groups across 12 participants, as well as factors behind students’ decisions to use AI based on six interviews. We identified 31 recipient-channel contexts and found that students’ AI use was shaped by channel-related factors, recipient type, and message characteristics.