“ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” Epistemic Beliefs and Metacognitive Accuracy in Students’ Integration of ChatGPT Content into Academic Writing

Recent studies have identified ChatGPT as an epistemic authority; however, no research has yet examined how epistemic beliefs and metacognitive accuracy impact actual work with ChatGPT-generated content, which is often prone to factual inaccuracies. Therefore, the present experimental study aimed to examine how university students integrate correct and incorrect information from expert-written and ChatGPT-generated articles when writing independently (N = 49) or with ChatGPT assistance (N = 49). Students working with ChatGPT-4o integrated more correct information from both expert-written (d = 0.64) and ChatGPT-generated articles (d = 0.95), but ChatGPT-assisted writing did not affect the amount of incorrect information sourced from the ChatGPT-generated article. Regardless of the condition, hierarchical regressions revealed that lower metacognitive bias was moderately associated with increased inclusion of correct information from the expert-written article (R2 = 12%). Conversely, a higher metacognitive bias (R2 = 10%) and epistemic beliefs (R2 = 12%) were moderately related to the inclusion of incorrect information from ChatGPT-generated articles. These findings suggest that while ChatGPT assistance enhances the integration of correct human- and AI-generated content, metacognitive skills remain essential to mitigate the risks of incorporating incorrect AI-generated information.