Assessing AI and Social Media Effects on Undergraduate College Students’ in Agartala, Tripura

This study explores the profound impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and social media on undergraduate students across six of the government degree colleges in the city of Agartala, in Tripura State. Through the use of a random sampling method, the researchers collected the requisite data was collected from approximately 393 students through well-structured questionnaires. The main objective of this research has been to analyse a large varieties of information-evaluation arrangements, the amount of time that is spent on social media by the undergraduate students, the purpose of usage, and the relative and strongly associated confrontations. The main conclusions and results reveal a strong preference for digital tools, with web search engines (95.2%) and multimodal AI (76.7%) dominating over the traditional and archetypal resources, such as, printed j ournals (21.2%). The usage of the social media indicated a dual trend, which is YouTube (76.7%) and WhatsApp (69.2%) were primarily used for academics, while Instagram (75.3%) and Facebook (72.6%) served mostly the objective of leisure. A significant 58.2% of students occupied over 4 hours daily on social media, with Instagram showing a strong correlation (r = 0.72) with excessive usage. Despite benefits like job alerts (82.9%) and file-sharing (69.2%), apprehensions like the internet addiction (95.9%) and time-wasting (52.1%) were almost prevalent in a large number of cases. The extensive adoption of AI was led by ChatGPT (63.7%), though 14.4% abstained, citing awareness gaps. The encounters included a total lack of AI literacy (72.1%) and Wi-Fi unavailability (33.7%). The study further underlines the explicit requirement for institutional interventions, such as, digital literacy programs and infrastructure upgrades, to optimize the educational potential of the technology while mitigating risks at the same time.