The Unregulated Middle: Generative AI in Foreign Language Teacher Education between the EU AI Act and Ukrainian Law
Keywords:
artificial intelligence, AI Act, academic integrity, sui generis right, teacher education, UkraineAbstract
Generative artificial intelligence entered foreign language teacher education faster than the law governing it. This article asks a narrow doctrinal question: which binding rules actually apply when a Ukrainian pre-service teacher of English uses a commercial large language model to prepare, deliver or assess instruction? It answers by reading three bodies of law against one another — the EU Artificial Intelligence Act as amended by the Digital Omnibus of July 2026, Ukraine’s Law on Copyright and Related Rights of 2022, and Article 42 of Ukraine’s Law on Education. Three findings follow. First, the AI Act does not designate educational artificial intelligence as high-risk by sector; Annex III lists four discrete use cases, the obligations attaching to them are deferred to December 2027, and what binds today is the literacy duty in Article 4 and the transparency duty in Article 50. Second, Ukraine’s sui generis right in non-original computer-generated objects gives a teacher a proprietary position in generated teaching materials but no authorship, and the statutory notion of the lawful user of a computer program does not map cleanly onto cloud services. Third, undisclosed generative AI use cannot constitute academic plagiarism under Ukrainian law, and constitutes cheating only where an institution has designated such tools as impermissible sources. Between these layers sits an unregulated middle that statute delegates to institutional rule-making and that most Ukrainian universities have not yet occupied.
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