UTILIZING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WRITING TOOLS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING: A CASE STUDY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH MALANG

This study investigates the students' perception and the implementation of the use of Artificial Intelligence Writing Tools (AIWTs) in academic writing by BGSMA students in the Master’s Program of English Language Education at The University of Muhammadiyah Malang. This study employed a Qualitative case study as its research approach. Data collection techniques are based on interviews. The findings of this study showed that BGSMA students have a positive perception of the use of AIWTs in academic writing. Most respondents considered AIWTs such as Grammarly, QuillBot, ChatGPT, Mendeley, and Turnitin as very helpful tools in improving academic writing and speeding up the writing process. Students felt happier, helped, more confident and motivated in completing academic assignments after using these tools. In terms of implementation, students used AIWTs strategically in various stages of academic writing, from pre-writing, drafting, revising and finalizing stage. However, challenges were also found in its implementation, namely in terms of accuracy and limitations. The drawback of this research is that it does not examine the extent of the effectiveness in using AIWTs for academic writing. Further research is recommended to explore the long-term impact of AIWTs use on students' academic writing skills and to compare the effectiveness of AIWTs in different disciplinary contexts. Research using quantitative or mixed approaches can also be conducted to obtain broader and more in-depth data on the relationship between perception, use, and significant improvement in writing skills.