“AI, will you help?” How learners use Artificial Intelligence when writing

Abstract

The current surge in the exploitation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, accompanied by the subsequent rise in popularity of AI across different spheres of life, has unlocked a multitude of opportunities for students to employ diverse AI strategies to augment their process of learning. Drawing on the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence, the article examines the process of assisting academic writing instruction with an AI-enhanced word processor. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how successful advanced students are in determining whether an essay was written by AI tools or by a human and how much AI assistance they need to summarize, generate text and write from prompts when trained to use an AI-assisted word processor. The empirical data for the scientific investigation was obtained through a quasi-experimental treatment involving a single group of undergraduate applied linguistics students. The findings of this study indicate the high linguistic sensitivity of the research participants to factors regarding language and layout, which allows them to distinguish human authors from AI-powered texts. The current investigation possesses potential advantages for educators in the realm of foreign language acquisition and instruction, as they contemplate the strengths of their bilingual language learners within academic writing instruction.