Whiting, Chris ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9237-2443 and Fleet, Paul (2026) Hyper-Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Higher Education: Re-centring Authenticity, Agency, and Human Experience. In: Koole, Marguerite, Smith, Matt, Traxler, John and Qaddumi, Hussam, (eds.) The Handbook of Educational Technology and Social Justice. Elgar (Submitted)

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Abstract

Artificial Intelligence has entered Higher Education faster than our capacity to regulate, understand, or theorise it, and the narratives used to sell it — abundance, artificial general intelligence, liberation from unwanted labour — are outpacing any stable relationship to the reality they claim to describe. Further, they move us ever further away from the social implications of the work we engage with on a daily basis. This chapter reads the AI-in-education discourse through Jean Baudrillard's precession of simulacra, tracing how signs of learning (grades, assessment products, corporate adoption announcements) have become detached from any verifiable referent, producing a hyperreality in which the map precedes and replaces the territory. Read alongside a reappraisal of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for an increasingly technology-driven society, and a critique of assessment as a signifier of learning rather than evidence of it, we contend that authenticity in higher education assessment must be reoriented away from performative products and toward the friction of learning itself. To enable this friction, we employ the principle of cognitive offloading which can support and enhance thinking (as opposed to cognitive outsourcing which relinquishes the responsibility to learn) as a mode of activity that preserves the academically critical and human-centered enquiry of learning that is the gold standard of higher education.
Turning to the dominant industry narratives of abundance, AGI, and the transformation of work, we suggest these function as empty gestures rather than substantiated claims and concluding that higher education's task is not to resist AI but to preserve the friction, judgement, and responsibility that authentic learning, and a thinking human, require for the benefit of society as a whole.
This abstract was written by Claude Sonnet 5, and then heavily edited by the authors.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Submitted
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education T Technology > T Technology (General)
School/Department:	School of Education, Language and Psychology
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15409

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