The human in the loop: a conceptual framework for understanding humanness in AI-integrated higher education

As AI becomes more embedded in higher education, critical questions are being asked about whether components of academic work are still human. This conceptual article offers a theoretical framework and an eight-proposition process model to explain how university educators might perceive, negotiate, and maintain their humanness within the context of AI use. Based on Haslam’s dual-dimension model of humanness, sociomateriality, and professional identity theory, we propose that AI pressures compel educators to renegotiate their professional roles across four interrelated dynamics: articulating an indispensable human core, managing identity disruptions, restoring humanness through increased relationality, and cultivating a constructive ambivalence. Our specific theoretical contributions are a “humanness-in-the-mirror” reframing of dehumanization theory, a precisely specified construct of productive ambivalence as a persistent (rather than transitional) professional posture, and an AI-Humanness Inversion argument distinguishing professional and institutional claims about AI from ontological ones. We extend humanness theory by arguing that educators, in response to AI influence, emphasize features of human nature (e.g., warmth, presence, authentic connection) while reconceptualizing human distinctiveness as cognition that is situated, vulnerable, and relational rather than simply abstract problem solving. The paper offers these propositions and the conceptual model as a basis for future empirical research, not as established findings.