Artificial intelligence ethical awareness of university students in Ghana: A network and latent profile analyses

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly integrated into students' academic lives in Ghana, making it crucial to examine their perspectives on ethical dimensions. Against this backdrop, this study assesses the artificial intelligence ethical awareness (AIEA) among 509 Ghanaian university students across the dimensions of human autonomy, beneficence, and fairness, based on AIEA scale originally developed and validated in Hong Kong. The confirmatory factor analysis supported the scale's three-factor structure within this setting. The network analysis also demonstrated meaningful interconnection among the dimensions, with select items serving as conceptual links, most prominently tying concerns over human agency to perceptions of beneficence. The latent profile analysis further distinguished five student subgroups, spanning those exhibiting uniformly very high awareness to a small but notable cluster displaying no ethical awareness, particularly regarding beneficence. In addition, MANOVA results confirmed that gender contributed no statistically meaningful variation. Together, the evidence characterises AI ethical awareness as a coherent yet unevenly distributed construct, highlighting priorities for shaping future AI ethics curricula in Ghana.