ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
The Impact of University Students' AI Attitudes on AI-Assisted Creativity: The Mediating Role of AI Usage Motivation and the Moderating Role of AI Dependency
Provisionally accepted
- 1Qingdao University, Qingdao, Shandong, China
- 2Yantai Institute of Science and Technology, Yantai, China
- 3Ningbo University, Ningbo, China
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This study explores the development of university students' creativity within AI-assisted learning tasks, focusing on how attitudes toward AI influence AI-assisted creativity through the mediating role of AI usage motivation and the moderating role of AI dependency. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior and Self-Determination Theory, data were collected from 347 university students via a questionnaire survey and analyzed using structural equation modeling and bootstrap methods. The results indicate that AI attitudes exert a significant positive effect on AI-assisted creativity, fully mediated by three types of usage motivation: intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, and external regulation. Among these, identified regulation emerged as the strongest mediator. The moderating effect of AI dependency varied by motivation type: high AI dependency weakened the creative benefits of intrinsic motivation but strengthened the positive role of external regulation, while the pathway through identified regulation was largely unaffected. These findings highlight the central importance of motivation internalization in fostering AI-assisted creativity and offer both theoretical insights and practical guidance for integrating AI into higher education to support student creativity.
Keywords: AI attitudes, AI dependency, AI-Assisted Creativity, External regulation, Identifiedregulation, intrinsic motivation
Received: 05 Nov 2025; Accepted: 20 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Yin, Yuan, Zhang, Yang and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xinghua Wang
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