Living with AI: Digital Native Experiences in Navigating Artificial Intelligence and UNESCO AI Ethics

Abstract

The rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into educational contexts has transformed how students access information, create learning materials, and complete academic tasks. While AI offers significant opportunities for enhancing learning, it also raises ethical concerns related to information accuracy, plagiarism, privacy, critical thinking, and human agency. Guided by UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2021), this study explores how digital-native students experience and navigate AI in their everyday learning practices. Employing a qualitative narrative inquiry approach, the study involved three undergraduate students from different academic disciplines who regularly used AI tools for educational purposes. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed through transcription, coding, chronology building, restorying, and cross-narrative thematic analysis. The findings reveal that participants viewed AI not as an unquestionable source of knowledge but as a learning companion that supports understanding, idea generation, and academic productivity. The narratives further demonstrate that participants actively evaluated AI-generated information through verification practices, source checking, and critical reflection. Ethical concerns regarding plagiarism, credibility, privacy, and overreliance on AI emerged consistently across the narratives. Moreover, participants maintained intellectual agency by adapting, contextualizing, and rewriting AI-generated content rather than accepting it passively. These findings align with key UNESCO AI Ethics principles, particularly human oversight and determination, awareness and literacy, responsibility and accountability, and human-centered AI. The study concludes that effective and ethical AI use among digital-native students depends not merely on technological familiarity but on the development of AI literacy, critical thinking, and ethical awareness. The findings highlight the need for higher education institutions to integrate AI literacy and digital ethics into educational practices to support responsible human–AI collaboration.