A PhD dissertation in education written by artificial intelligence?

Abstract

This paper analyses data and perceptions of graduate students in Education on the partial production of an article, a master's thesis and a PhD dissertation written by artificial intelligence (AI). The motivation for the study occurs due to the rise of AI for text generation, examining the trends and implications of algorithmic writing usage by graduate students. We analyzed data originating from 123 questionnaires, and primarily, the contents of 17 interviews conducted in 2021. Some conclusions were that 88.6% of the graduate students are unfamiliar with AI use for text production, though the aggregated frequency demonstrates a tendency to use it by 84.5% and the interviews, carried out in safeguarded conditions, by 70.6%; the admission of use varied among categories in the individual and in context scopes; "AI and human hybrid" and "standard" type texts emerge from content analysis; a notion of plagiarism by AI appears; moral and ethical issues come up both as conditions and as an opposition to the use of AI in written production.