Ethical Risks and Point-of-Use Governance of AI in IPE: Insights from Interviews with 17 Instructors

This study examines ethical risks and workable governance for artificial intelligence in university ideological and political education in China. Semi-structured interviews with 17 instructors from five universities in Chongqing conducted from March to June 2025 were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Six themes characterize current practice: privacy and consent remain fragile in attendance, proctoring, and analytics; the teacher role shifts from authority to curator and ethical gatekeeper; recommendation and moderation shape visibility and the continuity of deliberation; assessment integrity benefits from process-based evidence and explicit disclosure; metric-driven activity targets can crowd out value reasoning; and governance and accountability depend on institutional capacity and consistent rules. The findings indicate that responsible integration requires governance at the point of use across classroom, platform, and institution, including course-level disclosure and granular consent, explainable moderation with instructor overrides and traceability, process-based assessment with AI-use disclosure, curated corpora linked to retrieval-augmented generation with citation binding, routine audits, and faculty training.