My Tutor is an AI: The Effects of Involvement and Tutor Type on Perceived Quality, Perceived Credibility, and Use Intention

With the advancement of AI technology, AI tutors are already being utilized in classrooms throughout the world as teaching aides, tutors, and peer learning specialists. AI tutors are good at facilitating various teaching-learning practices within and outside the classroom, and support students 24/7. However, little is known whether AI tutors can be as effective in learning languages as human tutors, and what factors would cause student learning outcome differences between human tutors and AI tutors, especially for those students who are not engaged in learning. The current study sought to address these questions by discovering the combination of two factors: involvement (high vs. low) and tutor type (human tutor vs. AI tutor) under two conditions: weak and high writing quality. The findings indicate that there is an interaction effect between user involvement and tutor type. When user involvement is low, the AI tutor is perceived to have a higher writing quality than the human tutor; when user involvement was high, tutor type did not affect the perceived writing quality of the tutor, no matter the tutor was a human or an AI. The reason that the human tutor is preferred is that the human tutor is perceived to have a higher level of controllability than the AI tutor. The writing quality of tutors affects the credibility of tutors as well.