Governing the hybrid writer: ethics-washing discourse and algorithmic governmentality in academic AI platforms

This study critically examines the ethical frameworks of leading generative AI platforms to understand how they discursively position student writing, construct normative subjects, and redistribute epistemic authority in higher education. By asking what kind of “ethical academic subject” these documents construct and what functions their governance discourses perform, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of publicly available ethical and governance documents from nine widely used AI platforms and one contextual state-regulatory text, using versions retrieved on 1 October 2026. Guided by three research questions, the analysis drew on an integrated framework of posthumanism, sociomateriality, Foucauldian governmentality, and ethics of care, operationalised through Fairclough's three-dimensional model. The analysis reveals how these frameworks discursively construct students as hybrid cognitive agents simultaneously empowered by augmentation and disciplined by algorithmic oversight. We identify six interlocking discursive formations: safety governance, academic integrity regulation, transparency as an epistemic virtue, human-machine augmentation, platform procedural accountability, and relational responsibility, which function not as neutral ethical guides but as a powerful layer of discursively constituted algorithmic governmentality. We argue that platform ethics is discursively positioned to reshape academic authorship and to conduct student behaviour through regimes of corporate and state-aligned governance. The asymmetry between aspirational corporate commitments and directive user obligations is consistent with what the literature terms “ethics-washing”: ethical vocabulary that performs legitimacy while preserving corporate discretion. We identify this as a discursive function, not a demonstrated corporate motive. We also suggest, as a theoretical proposition for future empirical testing, that such regimes may leave limited spaces for tactical student agency. By conceptualising platform policies as claims to educational governing authority, we expose the tensions between empowerment and control embedded in AI-mediated writing and argue for critical platform literacy as an essential response to this parallel governance regime.