THE COPY AND PASTE CULTURE IN THE AGE OF GENERATIVE AI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS AMONG ENGLISH STUDENTS IN SOUTH-SOUTH NIGERIA

Abstract

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot has reshaped how university students in Nigeria approach academic composition, giving rise to a copy and paste disposition in which machine-generated text is transferred into assignments with minimal intellectual engagement. This paper narrows its focus to the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria, comprising Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo and Rivers States, and adopts a quantitative survey research design to examine the extent to which this culture threatens core writing competencies, namely independent composition, paraphrasing ability, citation literacy, and authorship and intellectual ownership, among English students in the region. Anchored on Self-Regulated Learning theory, the study drew a sample of 330 undergraduate English students from six federal universities across the six South-South states, using a multi-stage (proportionate stratified and simple random) sampling technique; 300 questionnaires were correctly completed and returned, yielding a 90.9 percent response rate. Data were collected using a structured, validated and reliability-tested questionnaire (overall Cronbach's alpha = .82) and analysed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (Pearson Product Moment Correlation, simple linear regression, independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA), all tested at the .05 level of significance. Findings show a high extent of generative AI-enabled copy and paste practice among respondents (grand mean = 2.98), a low extent of AI literacy (grand mean = 2.21), and comparatively low mean scores on independent composition, paraphrasing ability, citation literacy and authorship and intellectual ownership (means ranging from 2.11 to 2.44). Copy and paste culture correlated negatively and significantly with all four writing competencies (r ranging from -.41 to -.57, p < .001), and all four corresponding null hypotheses were rejected. No significant difference was found in copy and paste culture by gender, t(298) = 1.15, p = .251, or by state/institution, F(5, 294) = 1.87, p = .098, suggesting that the pattern is broadly uniform across the zone. The paper argues that uncritical AI adoption is significantly associated with lower levels of core writing competencies among English students in South-South Nigeria and recommends AI literacy instruction, revised assessment design, explicit institutional policy, and continued periodic quantitative monitoring.