Reclaiming Inquiry: Rethinking Research in the Age of AI

Abstract

To speak of “research excellence” today is to navigate an unsettled epistemological terrain where artificial intelligence is reshaping how we recognize, value, and produce knowledge. What constitutes rigor, originality, or discovery when algorithmic processes increasingly thread through research practice? The terms we inherit—authorship, creativity, novelty, discovery—are being recast, their meanings destabilized and renegotiated in ways we are only beginning to articulate. In these remarks, I discuss AI not as a tool or a threat but as a force that exposes the assumptions, hierarchies, and aspirations embedded in research culture itself. Language, as the medium through which we constitute knowledge, becomes the critical site for this reckoning. I argue that universities must meet this transformation with both rigor and imagination—alert to the genuine risks of superficiality, proprietary enclosure, and eroded judgment, while actively reclaiming inquiry as moral practice and intellectual adventure: transforming what becomes possible without relinquishing what remains irreducibly human.