COMPLEMENTING OR SUBSTITUTING: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL MEDIA NARRATIVES ON THE USE OF AI IN EDUCATION

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly changing the educational landscape, affecting the process of teaching, learning, and management. The media worldwide is a decisive factor that shapes how people perceive the role of AI, and it is usually depicted as a complementary factor to human educators or substitutive, and it may replace them (Luckin et al., 2016; Selwyn, 2019). The current study explores the ways global media discourse is building AI as an educational complement or substitute and discusses rhetorical and linguistic features employed to support or criticize AI integration. The qualitative research design adopted is based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Appraisal Theory on a sample of 200 English-language news items published in the period 2020-2025 on North America, Europe, Asia, and Middle East. Results show that complementary policies focus more on improvement, alliance, and ethical gains, whereas substitutive policies are concerned with risk, teacher replacement, and ethical issues. Such discourses as hybrid, ambivalent are both common and indicate uncertainty in the population. In the education sector, global media plays an active role in mediating the knowledge of the population and credibility of AI, influencing the views on its possible positive and negative aspects