AI-Locus of Control Continuum

Our proposed AI-Locus of Control framework has emerged from our recent longitudinal study on the impact of explicit teaching about AI literacy on students' agency and control beliefs in human-AI interactions (https://osf.io/preprints/edarxiv/6mke5_v3). From our analysis, we identified four key dimensions or tensions in AI-Locus of Control:

AGENCY: Does the AI have agency, or does the human retain it? Students with external LOC felt they had to either accept AI output or reject the entire idea of using AI. Students with internal LOC realised they could steer, adjust, and control output on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

EXPERTISE: Is AI better than human, or an input to human judgement? Some students initially treated AI as an expert that couldn't be questioned. Through the unit, they learned that their own prompting and setup was crucial to producing output they felt comfortable claiming as their own.

EMBODIMENT: Is there a mind behind the mirror, or is it a tool to be used? Early in the semester, students engaged with AI as if there was an intelligence behind it. By the end, they understood they held sole responsibility for populating the context window with facts and scaffolding.

PRAXIS: Automation versus augmentation? Some students used AI to automate their assignments entirely. Others learned to dip in and out, using it for partial ideation, sense-checking, and editing - augmenting rather than automating their process.

These four tensions give us a richer understanding of what AI-LOC means in practice.