Developing Competencies for the Ethical and Pedagogical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Physical Culture

Abstract

Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) expands opportunities for personalization, analysis, and decision support in Physical Culture; however, its curricular incorporation must preserve professional judgment, embodiment, and ethical responsibility. Objective: To construct a training model for developing ethical, pedagogical, research, and digital competencies related to AI use in Physical Culture professional education through a qualitative demonstration contextualized in Honduran and Cuban universities. Methods: An interpretive perspective and a constructivist grounded theory design were adopted. The demonstrative corpus comprised 16 synthetic interviews distributed among students, faculty members, graduates, and academic managers from the National Autonomous University of Honduras and Universidad de Oriente. A total of 144 response units were organized and subjected to initial, focused, and comparative coding using an analytical logic compatible with ATLAS.ti 25. Results: Twelve codes and six categories were identified: human agency and professional responsibility; ethics, privacy, and governance; curricular integration; data literacy and scientific verification; contextualization, equity, and infrastructure; and professional applications with defined limits. The core category was critical and humanistic professional competence for AI mediation. The resulting model connects ethical and scientific foundations, guided practice, professional problem solving, human oversight, authentic assessment, and institutional improvement. Conclusions: Competence in using AI in Physical Culture cannot be reduced to instrumental proficiency. It requires the integration of disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical reasoning, data protection, critical appraisal of evidence, and the ability to contextualize decisions. Because the corpus is synthetic, the findings constitute a methodological demonstration and must be contrasted with real fieldwork before being attributed to university populations. The proposal nevertheless offers a transparent analytical architecture for designing future empirical studies and for discussing responsible curricular innovation in professional education.