Generative artificial intelligence and epistemic (in)justice: perspectives from higher education students in the Global North and South

In this research, we explore how students from the Global North and Global South understand the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in shaping access to knowledge and epistemic (in)justice in higher education. We draw on theoretical logic of epistemic justice and postcolonial framework to explicate how GAI mediates knowledge hierarchies across diverse epistemological contexts. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 university students, five from the Global North and five from the Global South, to understand their everyday engagements with GAI. We found that students from the Global South often rely on GAI out of necessity to navigate infrastructural and institutional constraints, which limit their epistemic agency to choose whether to engage with such technologies. While GAI enables access to paywalled research and institutional resources, participants expressed concerns about the reliability, authority, and contextual grounding of GAI-generated knowledge. In contrast, students from Global North described GAI as a convenient but non-essential tool and were more critical of its epistemic limitations. Overall, our findings visibilised GAI’s dual role as both a knowledge democratizing resource and a tool with the potential to become a digital colonizer. We therefore recommend improvement beyond prompting or more training data to a new standard of epistemic accountability, where GAI systems are designed to disclose their limits, qualify their claims, and resist the temptation to perform authority where none exists.