2nd International Conference on Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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The Disappearance of Thought and the Loss of Semantic Agency
Constantine Andoniou
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines how the integration of generative AI into educational communication environments reshapes learning, pedagogy, and assessment. Rather than a rupture, the shift is understood as an accumulation of habits, interfaces, and systems that prioritize fluency, prediction, and stylistic conformity over reflection and meaning. As students and educators adapt to AI-mediated text generation—autocomplete, smart replies, generative assistance—language becomes less a space of cognitive agency and more a mechanism of alignment. The result is a learning environment where essays emulate templates, dialogue mirrors predictive systems, and interpretation collapses into confirmation. This condition, described as the gradual loss of semantic agency, challenges foundational principles of pedagogy: inquiry, reflection, and interpretive struggle. By analyzing the implications for digital literacy, assessment validity, and the development of learning theory, the paper argues that e-learning strategies must go beyond efficiency and fluency to cultivate spaces of hesitation, divergence, and critical thought. The contribution is both diagnostic and prescriptive: it identifies how AI reshapes educational communication and offers a framework for pedagogical responses that preserve meaning-making as a central aim of education in the digital era.
Keywords: AI in education, semantic agency, pedagogy and methodology, digital literacy, assessment in e-learning