Constructing the Algorithmic Educator: A Critical Discourse Analysis of AI in Education as Represented in High-Reach YouTube Panel Discussions

YouTube has become a significant but largely unstudied forum for public intellectual two-way conversations on AI in education as video has become a ubiquitous medium for communicating ideas. In a world dominated by video as a communication medium, YouTube has become a prominent location for two-way ideas exchanges about artificial intelligence (AI) in education that is not yet well studied as a site of discursive production. These conversations have the potential to influence and shape access to AI in education on an even larger scale than the scholarly publications they would enable, and these influences are evident in the policy, practice, and teacher identity for which these images of the future of education are constructed. The three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model by Fairclough (1992, 2003) is applied to a Corpus consisting of 20 (171,676 words) high-reach and purposively selected panel discussions (8) on YouTube from 2020 to 2026 with Nobel Prize winners, panelists of the WEF, researchers at the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute and panelists of the UNESCO chair. The six dominant discourse themes found through a process of analysis across 26 deductive and inductive codes, managed by NVivo 15, the student’s were: the discourse of inevitability, the teacher identity crisis, ethics in-depth arising from the question of governance, the equity paradox, the human exceptionalism, and the corporate authority. The results indicate that these themes support the educational future of AI in three systematic discursive processes: inevitability normalization, institutional authority concentration and equity instrumentalization. The findings recognize that the lack of practitioner educators outlined in each of 20 panels is in itself a form of discursive power, as absence rather than content. The study is intended to demonstrate that talking about AI in education is not only a reflection of educational futures, it is an act to creating them. As educators, policymakers, or communities aim to understand and embrace AI adoption as a democratic process, it is crucial that their discursive mechanisms are made visible. Recommendations are made for policy makers, schools, teacher educators, curriculum planners and researchers.