Date
Publisher
arXiv
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly described in higher education as a tool, collaborator, evaluator, proxy, and infrastructure. These labels are not neutral: they shape who is seen as acting, knowing, and, crucially, being answerable when someone uses AI. This study examines how scholars distribute such responsibility across 366 English-language titles and abstracts published between November 2022 and 14 August 2026. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis combined frequency counts, five-word collocations, actor-predicate associations, obligation-clause coding, and heuristic analysis of passives, nominalisations, and reporting metonymies. The final corpus contained 91,405 tokens, drawn from 8,734 unique records screened after deduplication. AI was the most frequently named actor, appearing 2,050 times and entering 447 predicate associations, most involving action. Students, by contrast, were more often associated with knowing, judging, and verifying, yet no sentence ever made AI explicitly responsible. Responsibility fell largely on educators, institutions, and policy, or disappeared through passive and nominalised constructions. Even frequent phrases such as "responsible AI" and "responsible use" rarely identify who is accountable for what. The findings reveal a persistent gap between giving AI functional agency and assigning normative accountability.
Study at a glance
- Question: How does higher education research linguistically distribute agency, epistemic responsibility, and accountability regarding generative AI?
- Setting and data: 366 English-language journal articles, reviews, and conference paper titles and abstracts on higher education, November 2022 to August 2026.
- Method: Corpus-assisted discourse analysis
Why it matters
The labels used for generative AI in higher education shape who is seen as acting, knowing, and being answerable. However, recurring scholarly language rarely receives analysis for how it assigns action versus explicit accountability.
Key findings
- AI was the most frequently named actor, appearing 2,050 times and in 447 predicate associations, with 78.7% involving functional action rather than knowledge or judgment.
- No sentence in the analyzed corpus ever made AI explicitly responsible, and its sole direct accountability clause stated that no accountability applies.
- Responsibility and obligations fell predominantly on educators and institutions or disappeared through 800 passive constructions, 1,152 nominalizations, and reporting metonyms.
Summary drafted with AI from the full paper and may contain errors. See the full paper for details.
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