Is Artificial Intelligence in Education an Object or a Subject? Evidence from a Story Completion Exercise on Learner-AI Interactions

Much of the literature on artificial intelligence (AI) in education imagines AI as a tool in the service of teaching and learning. Is such a one-way relationship all that exists between AI and learners? In this paper we report on a thematic analysis of 92 participant responses to a story completion exercise which asked them to describe a classroom agreement between an AI instructor and a learner twenty years into the future. Using a relational theoretical framework, we find that the classroom agreements between AI and learners that participants produced encompassed elements of education, boundaries, affordances, and social conventions. These findings suggest that the ways learners relate to AI vary. Some learners relate to AI as an object, others relate to AI as a subject, and some relate to AI both as an object and a subject. These results invite a deeper engagement with the ways in which learners might relate to AI and the kinds of ethics and social protocols that such relations suggest.