Tierney et al. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (2025) 20:5 © The Author(s). 2024 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Student perceptions on the impact of AI on their teaching and learning experiences in higher education Aisling Tierney *, Peter Peasey and Joe Gould *Correspondence: a.tierney@bristol.ac.uk Bristol Institute of Learning and Teaching, University of Bristol, Beacon House, Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1QU, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract This paper provides evidence of student perspectives of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Higher Education (HE). In contrast to the extant literature that uses large-scale survey data to gather the student voice, research methods that prioritise qualitative data collection are presented. The data responds to a gap in the empirical evidence, redressing the lack of qualitative data on students’ thoughts and feelings in response to AI within a UK context. The paper also compares categorisations of concern relating to AI in HE between that published by academics and that generated by students using their own frames of reference. Recommendations for HE institutions are provided in response to issues identified in the literature and the research data. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Student voice, Qualitative research, Higher education Introduction In the 2022 Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) conference, social scientist Wayne Holmes convened a panel entitled, “AIED: Coming of Age?” to provoke introspection on the event topic. Holmes argues for a shared and emergent education community responsibility to address implications for the use of AI, partly prompted by the growth in use of ChatGPT and, given its historic expertise in this field, AIED’s resultant increased public profile (Holmes, 2024). AIED represents a long-established research and development area with significant global revenue and widespread adoption in HE institutions. In on-site and blended-campus universities, AI technology is used to add capacity to support services (Berry, 2019), complete and automate administrative tasks