Artificial Intelligence: A Look Back to the Future in University Education

The year 2023 marked a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, but the education community was not necessarily prepared for the introduction and use of new software such as ChatGPT, Adobe Generative Fill, Stable Diffusion, and others. AI could be asked to write essays, plan project work, or simply keep students’ company through long hours of solitary study. The question remains, is AI the enemy educators should resist, a colleague that should be encouraged to facilitate student learning, or where is the space to be occupied somewhere between the two extremes? In this context, the research seeks to go beyond knowing whether and how students are using AI, to begin to understand why they use it as they have done throughout 2023. A semi-structured survey was carried out with the public including students and teachers from different faculties and disciplines from all around Ecuador, who had found AI coming into their professional. The insights from the survey will be compared between each other and with published material with bottom-up experiences that were felt at a student level. The impact will be that we will be able to assess where, how, and why we will operate over the coming years.