Conference paper
ChatGPT Is Actually My Friend: Understanding the Information Behavior of University Students Interacting with AI Chatbots
Companion Publication of the 2025 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, pp 282-287
18 Oct 2025
Abstract
The rapid adoption of AI chatbots has sparked widespread debates about how their prevalence will impact higher education. This late-breaking work presents findings from an exploratory study comprised of a survey of 199 university students and 8 semi-structured follow-up interviews on university students’ use and assessment of AI chatbots as an information resource compared with search engines for a variety of topics. We found university students from varied disciplines view chatbots as a valuable all-purpose information tool for most topics for several reasons, including their perceived versatility and single-answer response format and their provision of emotional support. We discuss the implications of these findings for design and future research directions.
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Details
- Title
- ChatGPT Is Actually My Friend: Understanding the Information Behavior of University Students Interacting with AI Chatbots
- Creators
- Erica Shusas - ,Andrea Forte - ,
- Publication Details
- Companion Publication of the 2025 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, pp 282-287
- Conference
- Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '25) (Bergen, Norway, 18 Oct 2025–22 Oct 2025)
- Series
- ACM Conferences
- Publisher
- ACM
- Number of pages
- 6
- Resource Type
- Conference paper
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- College of Computing and Informatics
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-105031908818
- Other Identifier
- 991022170457404721