Tasting the ‘Forbidden Fruit’: Artificial Intelligence, digital inequality, and compensatory capital among South African university students

This paper explores how students from socioeconomically marginalised backgrounds in South Africa’s higher education system engage with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as ChatGPT amid institutional ambivalence and digital inequality. Using the metaphor of tasting the forbidden fruit, the study conceptualises students’ interaction with AI as a paradoxical act of necessity and defiance, both restricted and liberating. Drawing on a qualitative narrative approach, ten first-year students from an urban university shared life-story reflections on their experiences of digital precarity, adaptation, and agency. Guided by the theoretical lens of compensatory capital, the analysis reveals how students mobilise material resourcefulness, cognitive adaptability, and relational solidarity to transform AI from a prohibited tool into a means of academic empowerment. The findings demonstrate that AI functions as both a pedagogical equaliser and a symbol of inequality, reflecting the moral and structural tensions that define South Africa’s digitalised learning environments. By foregrounding students’ lived experiences, the paper shifts the focus from institutional policy debates toward the micro-politics of digital survival and human resilience. It concludes that equitable AI integration in higher education requires a socially just, humanised approach, one that recognises students not as passive consumers of technology but as active co-creators of digital knowledge and possibility.