Moroccan Doctoral Students and Artificial Intelligence: The Correlation between Literacy and Trust

Abstract

Nowadays, doctoral students and researchers rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to assist them with their studies, as the perceived helpfulness of those AI-powered tools cannot be denied. While many consider AI of great importance when reviewing the literature, others believe that analyzing data is the strongest suit of AI. This study investigates the relationship between AI literacy and AI trust among Moroccan doctoral students. It adopts a descriptive-correlational design and aims to assess the strength of the relationship between AI literacy and AI trust. Data was collected from doctoral students, using two scales: the Artificial Intelligence Literacy Scale (Ma & Chen, 2024) and the Human-Computer Trust Scale (Gulati et al., 2019). Pearson’s correlation analysis, conducted using SPSS 25, revealed a weak positive correlation between AI literacy and AI trust. AI use was the most correlated with AI trust, while AI competence trust was the most correlated with AI literacy. These findings stress the role of AI literacy in influencing the trust doctoral students put in AI for research purposes.