The double edge of communicative AI: continuity and disruption in higher education

Abstract This paper examines how Communicative Artificial Intelligence (ComAI), i.e., AI systems that automate communication, reshapes higher education. We advance “strategic temporal orientation” as a research attitude that switches strategically between continuity and disruption: including ComAI in long historical trajectories of educational technology while identifying genuinely novel loci that demand new safeguards, research and scrutiny. Conceptually, we frame ComAI’s integration into tutoring, peer learning, assessment, and administration as a “hybrid figuration”, a supra-individual distribution of agency across humans and machines that reconfigures roles, responsibilities, and power in student–teacher relations. We synthesize past and current developments to resist hype, emphasizing slow, heterogeneous adoption and institutional inertia. At the same time, we examine shifts regarding datafication, platformization, and dependency on BigTech. We illustrate how communicative practices become sites of disruption (e.g., large language models changing written assessment) and counter-moves as reactions (e.g., renewed interest in oral exams), and we trace inequality-related implications of both, including amplified bias, cultures of distrust, and perceptual harms that differentially affect marginalized students. We argue for intentional slowness in institutional decision making, reduced dependency on commercial platforms, and special caution regarding evolving legal regulation under conditions of uncertainty. We articulate a research agenda on hybrid human–AI practices that examines (1) students’ appropriation of conversational agents and (2) shifts in instructors’ authority and accountability when automation mediates communication. Looking to future time frames many years from now, we develop scenarios that anticipate modest, indirect, and uneven changes shaped by organizational conservatism, alongside domain specific transformations (e.g., automated laboratories, as well as embodied and agentic AI) that might re-distribute competencies from execution to design and interpretation. We conclude that strategic temporal orientation provides a multidisciplinary compass, or meta-lens, for assessing ComAI’s implications, guiding governance and interdisciplinary inquiry of ComAI in “hybrid futures”.