Existing ethical discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) position it as a technical instrument, reducing ethics to data security, privacy, and intellectual property while sidelining its role as an active participant in research. While important, these perspectives—rooted in procedural compliance and human-centered responsibility—are insufficient for addressing the conditions through which AI reshapes knowledge production. In response, we reconceptualize AI as a constitutive participant in inquiry. Drawing on materialist and posthumanist perspectives, we theorize an AI ethical episteme across three interwoven planes—material–structural, epistemic–distributive, and relational–performative—specifying how each reconfigures ethical life in AI-assisted qualitative inquiry. Across these planes, we show how extractive infrastructures, recursive epistemic loops, and affectively persuasive human–AI relations reorganize harm, authority, and accountability. We argue that qualitative ethics must be reoriented as an ongoing, situated practice of response-ability attentive to the conditions of inquiry in a world already entangled with AI.

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Jordan, L. S., Johnson, M. W., & Wolgemuth, J.R. (submitted). Risky collaborators: Qualitative research ethics in an era of algorithmic co-presence.

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