Since the Covid pandemic, the use of AI in higher education has grown rapidly, its potential to enhance teaching and learning being considerable. Following the ethical guidelines set by the European Commission, Finnish universities have developed their own guidelines to encourage teachers to use AI in their teaching. For their part, researchers have investigated the impact of AI in education from the perspectives of teaching and learning, providing regular states of play of AI’s use among teachers and students. Indeed, it is crucial for higher education institutions and teachers to maintain a critical and supervised attitude towards the use of AI in education, to address and adapt to the challenges and issues.

This study aimed to investigate the use of artificial intelligence among language teachers from Finnish higher education, in their work, and with their students, and by examining their views on their students’ use, as well as their needs.

An online questionnaire was designed to collect data from higher education language teachers from 5 Finnish universities at the end of spring, 2025.

The results show that most of the language teachers use AI, mostly ChatGPT, to create content & resources, half of them to support language & translation and less than half to prepare students for future. However, while AI is largely considered as an assistant by the language teachers, 25% of them view it as a competitor, an enemy or a complicator. Moreover, half of them consider the dependence on technology, the loss of human interaction and the privacy concerns as the main challenges of AI’s use. The majority allow their students to use AI for assignments and class activities, mainly to generate ideas, proofread, translate, and clarify difficult concepts. The majority consider that most students are using AI, the main reasons being the lack of time, confidence and motivation. The majority discuss occasionally AI with their students and provide rules to the students regarding their use of AI. The majority considers AI’s use as cheating if the rules provided by the institution, or the teacher are transgressed. Finally, more than half declare being unsatisfied with the trainings or AI tools provided by their institution, and most of them wish for specific trainings and collaboration with colleagues.

We conclude that language teachers, nowadays fully aware of their limitations to avoid or control their students’ use of AI, still struggle to integrate AI for the benefit of their students’ future, as they lack directions and concrete objectives. Indeed, while universities are encouraging the language teachers to use AI, relying on them to prepare their students for the future, there is a lack of guidelines, specific trainings, objectives and AI tools.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Language teachers, Higher Education, Guidelines, Challenges & limitations.