Foregrounding doctoral knowledge and knower in the age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

While Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents new challenges for doctoral education, it also offers an opportunity to refocus doctoral programmes on their fundamental purposes: contributing to knowledge and developing critical researchers. This article draws on the literature on doctoral education to contend that a fixation on efficiency and market-driven outcomes has made doctoral education particularly vulnerable to the misuse of AI. This is because seeing the doctorate as a product to be acquired within a minimum time diminishes the likelihood of substantive conversations taking place about scholarly responsibility and the nature of knowledge creation. By outlining a few ethical deliberations about Generative AI pertinent to all doctoral candidates, this opinion article optimistically suggests that the common concerns about the misuse of AI in our institutions might act as a catalyst, turning the focus onto the knowledge and knowers of doctoral education.
Contribution: The emergence of Generative AI, such as Large Language Models ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek, has led to concerns about authorship in the doctorate. This article suggests that we should instead use this potential threat as the impetus to turn the focus onto the knowledge and knower purposes of doctoral education.