Introduction:
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been hailed in the press as both the saviour and devil of both business and academe. Academics of all stripes have weighed in that student use of AI needs to be either controlled and/or promoted.
The major concern of professors is the ability of students to use AI to ‘cheat’ in classes. Overall, 43% of college students say they have experience using AI tools like ChatGPT. Of those who have used AI, half (50%) say they've used these tools on assignments or exams.
Alternatively, others suggest the opposite. “AI tools have revolutionized education by providing personalized learning experiences, making education more accessible, and enhancing student engagement. With continued advancements in AI technology, the future of education holds great promise, as it continues to evolve and adapt to the changing needs of students”.
The purpose of this study is to identify how students use AI and what further education they would like to learn with regard to using AI as a productivity tool.

Methodology:
An exploratory survey was conducted of undergraduate students at a US regional university over three consecutive academic semesters. Three hundred and fourteen students responded. Of those responding, most indicated that they used AI in the last six. The survey consisted of three parts. The first part requested information on which AI platform they had used. The second part asked on a 1-5 scale the purpose for which they employed AI. Lastly, students were asked what AI subjects they would like to learn more about.

Results:
Overall, students mostly rated themselves as “novice” (26.8%) or “beginners” (40.2%) regarding their knowledge of AI. Only 9.3% rated themselves as ‘competent” with the remaining 23.7% self-rating of proficient. None of the students rated themselves as ‘expert’, which is indicative of a gap in knowledge that presents an opportunity for academe to fill.
Slightly less than half of students indicated that they use AI to complete homework or projects directly. Many students suggest that they use AI for generating ideas, explaining concepts, searching for information and finding additional information to complete projects. Alternatively, AI is used least frequently to create drafts of assignments and respond to queries or emails. AI use for proofreading and finding additional sources/citations were also not as common.
Interestingly, when students were surveyed on what they wanted to learn about AI, the averages were significantly higher. This is indicative of a knowledge gap and interest that academe has a vested interest in fulfilling. Most students would be interested in a class on the basic uses of AI. This was closely followed by specific knowledge desires for uses in the education and potential job uses.

More specific student learning objectives regarding prompt development were also asked. Students seem generally interested in this subject with all ratings above 3.4. Students showed interest in learning prompts that:
a) encouraged AI to take on a specific role;
b) respond withing a specific context;
c) generating specific task related information; generating information in a specific format; verifying current work or documents; improving writing to create final drafts and generally writing better prompts.

This suggests that students are interested on not only learning what AI can be used for, but the specifics of how to write better prompts.

Keywords: Generative Artificial Intelligence, Student Use of AI, Prompt engineering in AI.