“I Wanted to Show I Could Do This on My Own”: Vulnerability and Professional Becoming in the Age of ChatGPT

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has sparked global debate in education regarding authorship, ethics, and knowledge production (Sumakul et al., 2022; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019). While much research highlights AI's affordances and risks, less attention has been paid to how early-career multilingual teacher educators navigate this terrain. This collaborative autoethnography explores how two novice multilingual educators, working in transnational contexts, experience professional vulnerability and identity (re)formation at the intersection of AI, emotion, and institutional expectations. Drawing on a new materialist stance (Barad, 2007; Sah, 2023), we trace how our orientations to AI are entangled with emotions, accountability, and language norms. Using reflection logs, identity maps, and collaborative dialogues, we illustrate complementary trajectories of resistance, adaptation, and ethical negotiation. This study contributes to research on multilingual teacher educator development by foregrounding emotional reflexivity, techno-ethical tensions, and identity assemblage in the age of AI.