Productivity, efficiency, and optimization: Research through the lens of AI Marketing

Abstract

The rapid emergence of AI-driven tools that promise to ‘revolutionize’ academic research has introduced new ideas of what it means to develop scholarly work. These platforms, marketed as research assistants or co-authors, promote particular visions of productivity, efficiency, and optimization that deserve critical scrutiny. This study investigates how such framings are constructed through the promotional discourses of publicly available AI research tools websites. By analyzing the discourses used to frame these tools, I ask: How are the researchers and their craft framed by AI marketing, and what ethical and epistemic assumptions underpin these framings? Drawing from critical discourse studies, I examine how appeals to ‘efficiency,’ accessibility,’ or ‘responsibility’ are mobilized to position AI as indispensable for research, while simultaneously obscuring issues of power, bias, and dependency. The analysis highlights tensions between the promise of democratized research and the reinforcement of technocapitalist logics that reduce scholarship to measurable outputs. By focusing on marketing discourses, this study interrogates how AI is influencing understandings of research itself. Ultimately, I argue that these promotional discourses are not neutral but actively participate in redefining the ethics and practice of educational research.