AI-Generated Plausibility and Epistemic Responsibility in Higher Education: Implications for Knowledge, Learning, and Society

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in higher education not merely as a set of technological tools, but as a structural transformation of the cognitive and social environment in which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and transmitted. The article is guided by the following question: how does AI-generated plausibility become mistaken for knowledge in higher education? The article is a conceptual study. It does not validate a new psychometric construct, nor claim that plausibility, fluency, authority effects, automation bias, or epistemic dependence originate with AI. It defines epistemic plausibility bias more narrowly as a recurring validation-level distortion in which the perceived quality of a knowledge-like output is allowed to substitute for an adequately calibrated assessment of the warrant supporting it. Existing concepts explain important antecedents of this distortion, whereas the proposed concept identifies the epistemic transition from plausibility cues to attributed warrant and, when outputs enter academic procedures, to institutional validation. AI is treated as a cognitive condition only as shorthand for a socio-technical condition of academic cognition: it reorganises environments in which academic search, synthesis, writing, assessment, verification, and judgement are delegated, accelerated, and institutionally normalised. The expression is not proposed as an alternative to technological mediation, distributed cognition, extended cognition, or cognitive offloading. The analysis examines implications for teaching, research writing, assessment, peer review, institutional responsibility, cognitive inequality, and the public role of universities. It argues that higher education should respond not through simple prohibition or uncritical adoption, but through critical AI literacy, process-oriented assessment, preservation of critical time, and institutional governance of epistemic delegation.