Abstract:

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have rapidly entered higher education, creating new opportunities for learning while raising questions about authorship, assessment and the role of automation in student work. These tensions are particularly visible in media and communication degrees, where understanding how stories are structured and represented across different formats is a core part of the curriculum.

This paper presents a qualitative study of university students’ reflections on using ChatGPT to support a short creative narrative exercise embedded in a third-year undergraduate course on Audiovisual Narrative within a Media Studies degree at the University of Valencia (Spain). The course combines theoretical and practical components, engaging students in the analysis of audiovisual narratives and in applied activities where concepts are tested on specific examples. Within this framework, a compulsory task asks students to design the plot outline of a classical story and then request ChatGPT to rewrite or expand that outline.

The activity ends with two open questions:
(1) a comparison between the student’s plot and the AI-generated version, and
(2) a brief commentary on the experience of using artificial intelligence in this learning context.

The study has three main objectives:
(a) to analyse how students describe ChatGPT’s contribution to plot design (structure, clarity, length and dramatic tension),
(b) to explore how they position themselves as authors when working alongside an AI system, and
(c) to examine how they articulate ethical, professional and environmental concerns about AI in higher education.

The corpus will consist of open-ended responses collected from three consecutive cohorts of students between the academic years 2023–24 and 2025–26, which will be fully available by the time of the conference. Data will be coded inductively and deductively using qualitative data analysis software (NVivo) by at least two researchers, who will iteratively refine a shared codebook and resolve coding discrepancies through discussion, and then examined through thematic analysis and cross-cohort comparison. The analysis is informed by research on AI literacy, student agency and critical perspectives on generative AI in higher education.

The analysis will map recurring themes, tensions and ambivalences in students’ discourse, with particular attention to how appreciation of AI-assisted writing coexists with discomfort, distrust or concern about its broader implications. As a single qualitative case study, the aim is not statistical generalisation but a context-rich account that may be useful for other programmes exploring similar AI-supported activities. By focusing on students’ own words, the paper discusses implications for AI literacy, narrative pedagogy and the ethical integration of generative AI in communication degrees, in line with INTED tracks on Impact of AI on Education, AI, Chatbots & Robots and Ethical Issues in Education.

Keywords:

Generative AI, ChatGPT, AI literacy, Narrative pedagogy, Higher education.