Generative AI and the Irreducible Role of Teachers as Callers into Subjectness: A Placebo–Nocebo–Treatment Framework

The current discourse on Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education largely overlooks its potential disruption to what educational philosopher Gert Biesta identifies as one of the irreducible purposes of education. Despite its foundational importance, subjectification—the process by which students become autonomous and responsible subjects—remains marginalised in instrumental debates on GenAI benefits and drawbacks. Given subjectification’s resistance to measurement, the paper interrogates GenAI’s potential impact through a medical metaphor of placebo, nocebo, and treatment deployed as a tripartite analytical framework. Through this lens, the analysis reveals how GenAI operates in two ways that are contradictory in form but convergent in their reasons and outcomes. Whilst a placebo effect constitutes the illusion of subjectification without the authentic effort of becoming, a nocebo (inverse of placebo) captures students’ retreat from becoming subjects resulting from their responsibilisation in relation to GenAI and the perceived intellectual superiority of the machine. The paper argues that both effects stem from the ontological confusion and the systematic displacement of the human teacher as a ‘caller’ who summons students into subject-ness within a shared world. The paper then identifies the urgent treatment as the restoration of the teacher’s presence as irreducible, which, in turn, necessitates the clear ongoing positioning of GenAI as an object and a tool incapable of calling. By grounding this normative argument in critical realism, metaphor as a method, and Biesta’s philosophy of education, the paper proposes that the future of education in the age of GenAI depends on defending the conditions under which students can come to exist as subjects in and for the world.