Name: Ravikiran N.R., Hemanth Kumar S. & Ravikumar R.
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Vol-16, issue-1, Year-2026 (JUNE special issue ) Special Issue: Ai, Ethics and Human Values : Shaping the Future of Higher Education
Page Number: 341-353
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21532986

ABSTRACT
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has rapidly entered higher education, but its educational legitimacy now depends not only on usefulness and ease of use, but also on whether students perceive such systems as fair, accountable, transparent, and ethically governable. This study revises and strengthens an earlier draft by developing a theoretically aligned, transparently reported preliminary empirical manuscript that integrates the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) lens with the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to examine students’ behavioural intention to use GenAI and their self-reported ethical usage behaviour. The study uses a simulated dataset of 450 higher education students and 33 Likert-type indicators spanning FATE, UTAUT, behavioural intention, ethical usage behaviour, and AI literacy. Because the available dataset is simulated and not field collected, the study is explicitly positioned as a preliminary model-