Student and AI responses to physics problems examined through the lenses of sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning

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Several reports in education have called for transforming physics learning environments by promoting sensemaking of real-world scenarios in light of curricular ideas. Recent advancements in Generative-Artificial Intelligence have garnered increasing traction in educators' community by virtue of its potential to transform STEM learning. In this exploratory study, we adopt a mixed-methods approach in comparatively examining student- and AI-generated responses to two different formats of a physics problem through the theoretical lenses of sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning. The student data is derived from think-aloud interviews of introductory students and the AI data comes from ChatGPT's (versions 3.5 and 4o) solutions collected using Zero shot approach. The results highlight AI responses to evidence most features of the two processes through well-structured solutions and student responses to effectively leverage representations in their solutions through iterative refinement of arguments. In other words, while AI responses reflect how physics is talked about, the student responses reflect how physics is practiced. Implications of these results in light of development and deployment of AI systems in physics pedagogy are discussed.