<p>This study explores how conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, are reshaping the meaning and practice of academic integrity in higher education. Two online focus groups were conducted with ten graduate students in a College of Education, exploring how they interpret, justify, and negotiate their use of conversational AI in academic work. Study participants recognized conversational AI as a useful support for learning and efficiency, yet their reflections revealed deeper tensions between authorship and assistance, originality and automation, and fairness and opportunity. Grounded in the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as a behavioural framework and extended through Aristotelian virtue-ethical perspectives that associated with deontology, utilitarianism, and consequentialism in modern context, the thematic analysis identified how students reasoned about conversational AI use as a matter of rule compliance, outcome evaluation, and moral character formation. These orientations together point to a shifting moral landscape in which academic integrity is no longer defined solely by rule enforcement but by ethical judgment, relational accountability, and institutional trust. The study proposes a virtue-centred framework that reimagines integrity as a shared practice among learners, educators, and technologies—an ethical ecosystem responsive to the realities of conversational AI in education.</p>