Usefulness and Ease of Using AI Tools for Writing Thesis: A Survey of Graduate Students

Abstract

The rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education has also profoundly changed students' experience when dealing with academic writing, particularly at graduate research and thesis level. The current study aims to explore the beliefs of MPhil English students at Islamabad based universities on AI tools functionality in thesis writing and its ease of use. Based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), it is a quantitative type of research, and the data was collected from 100 graduates’ students of different universities in Islamabad by using a structured Likert scale questionnaire via google form. To recognize patterns of perceptions and attitudes, descriptive statistics was analyzed by means of SPSS. Results of the study revealed that students perceive AI tools as primarily helpful and user-friendly in enhancing productivity, coherence, grammatical accuracy and effectiveness in their writing. Also graduate students have shown positive attitude towards AI adoption in research oriented tasks particularly thesis writing. From the findings, it can be inferred that perceived usefulness and ease of use play a crucial role in the acceptance of AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Writesonic, Quillbot, Microsoft co-pilot, Scispace, and Deepseek in academic writing.