This article examines the ethical implications of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in qualitative research, asking how research ethics is practiced within human–AI entanglements. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ethics of the self, it reframes ethics not as procedural compliance or principle-based frameworks, but as an ongoing and contingent practice of self-formation within contemporary academic conditions shaped by technocratic and neoliberal logics. Through an ethical reading of two speculative vignettes, the article shows how ethical risk may emerge when AI-assisted research is institutionally legible as “good enough,” and how ethical practice may remain open through unsettled and reflexive engagements with AI.
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