University Students’ Use and Assessment of Chatbots as an Information Resource: An Exploratory Study

The widespread use of AI chatbots has incited concerns about how chatbots will impact university students. In this work, we examine how students use chatbots as an information resource in their day‐to‐day lives. We present findings from an exploratory survey of 199 university students on their use and assessment of chatbots as an information resource for a variety of domains. Our findings reveal that university students make few distinctions between chatbots and search engines as information resources for most topics. We discuss the implications of our findings for future education and research directions.