Discussions around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education often polarise between utopian transformation and dystopian decline (Author et al., 2025), frequently detached from the technology’s actual capabilities (Cave & Dihal, 2019). This paper uses the 2023 film Barbie as a metaphor and analytic lens to interrogate such assumptions in relation to GenAI in education (Author, 2025). Methodologically, it combines cultural text analysis with Jasanoff and Kim’s (2015) concept of sociotechnical imaginaries—collectively held visions of desirable technological futures. These imaginaries shape cultural meanings of artificiality and agency in popular culture and debates around GenAI in education.

Narrative elements of the film, including its satire of corporate power and Barbie’s transformation from plastic doll to “real” woman, are examined alongside common GenAI marketing discourses. The hyperreal aesthetic of Barbieland is compared to polished narratives of personalisation and efficiency promoted by EdTech industries. Like Barbie’s empowerment, GenAI’s promise of educational transformation obscures its commercial logics, and dependencies on data extraction and optimisation (Ritzer et al., 2024). The metaphor highlights how educational technology privileges spectacle and profit over pedagogy.

Barbie’s transformation from manufactured object to embodied human also reflects anxieties about authenticity and authorship. As GenAI systems increasingly simulate voice, feedback, and text production, distinctions between real and artificial blur (Author, 2024), with outputs functioning as convincing copies without stable originals, complicating assessment and knowledge production in higher education (Luo, 2024).

To extend the analytic frame beyond Western consumer imaginaries, the paper juxtaposes Barbie with Ellen van Neerven’s Indigenous speculative fiction (2014). This comparative reading unsettles distinctions between human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, revealing how binary narratives constrain educational possibilities. The study argues that educational futures are shaped by the imaginaries through which AI is understood, and that cultivating critical AI literacy requires resisting technological solutionism and moral panic (Author, 2025).