With the advent of widely used publicly available Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, there has been an important question raised about AI’s place in education. This study aims to examine the relationship between students, educators, and AI. Twenty students in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State were interviewed. Through qualitative analysis, several themes emerged pertaining to how students see themselves using AI in their professional careers, how they currently use AI tools in the classroom, and how they believe AI should be integrated into the classroom in the future. The main themes found were that 1) students believe they will be using AI in the workforce, 2) saving time is a large motivation for AI use, 3) professors and students should learn AI for course use, 4) AI should be integrated into the classroom as a tool, 5) ChatGPT is intuitive to learn, 6) students desire common AI guidelines across classes, 7) there is a lack of trust in AI-generated responses, and 8) dependency on AI inhibits learning. These findings highlight the importance of proactive discussions around appropriate AI integration in education and call for collaboration between students and educators.
