Blue or Red Pill: Reimagining the Educator’s Role in the Age of GenAI The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education has prompted urgent questions about the evolving role of educators. This paper investigates how university teachers can reclaim pedagogical agency and ethical purpose in AI-mediated learning environments through a human-centered, values-driven lens, with particular attention to curriculum design, assessment practices, and teacher–student interaction. Grounded in the expanded TPACK+V model, which incorporates values into the interplay of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge, and informed by the 3Rs framework of Reflection, Resistance, and Renewal, this study offers a practical strategy for navigating GenAI critically, enabling educators to engage with innovation while resisting reductive or instrumentalist tendencies (Bozkurt, 2023; Gentile et al., 2023). The theoretical inquiry is supported by reflective experimentation with a range of GenAI platforms, including ChatGPT, Synthesia, Tome.app, Gamma, Chatbase, and Pi.ai. These tools were explored through structured pedagogical simulations, prompting educators to test content creation, feedback automation, and interactive student communication. Findings reveal a dual reality: while GenAI offers scalable solutions for content generation and personalization, it simultaneously raises concerns and risks of over-dependence, loss of pedagogical voice and teacher identity, and ethical concerns such as bias, surveillance, and inequity (Ha et al., 2023). Teachers who engaged with AI tools through a values-based lens reported increased awareness of their professional identity and greater intentionality in tool adoption. The paper concludes that meaningful AI integration must extend beyond efficiency and innovation rhetoric. It calls for professional development frameworks that foreground teacher agency, research literacy, and interdisciplinary reflection. By positioning educators not as passive users but as ethical designers of AI-enhanced education, this study contributes a practical and theoretical roadmap for navigating the future of teaching with integrity. Furthermore, effective AI platforms are also considered a metacognitive support tool for navigating digital pedagogy to shape the future of tomorrow.