Artificial Intelligence (AI) is frequently hailed as a ‘solution’ to many of education’s core problems (e.g., OECD, 2021) – problems such as the lack of qualified educators, student underachievement, and better preparing learners for 21st century career paths. However, such claims tend to be aspirational rather than evidence-based (Miao & Holmes, 2021), and overly simplistic, forgetting issues such as agency, pedagogy, surveillance, efficacy, and ethics (Holmes et al., 2021; Holmes et al., 2022; Holmes & Porayska-Pomsta, 2022). The growth of these claims and challenges has only been accelerated by the arrival of Generative AI. Although we are now almost 20 months since the launch of ChatGPT, the picture still isn’t clear. On the one hand Generative AI has been proposed as a tool to personalise learning and speed up academic research, on the other hand Generative AI has been identified as a tool that produces only simplistic, superficial, and often incorrect outputs. At the same time, Generative AI has been called the first step in Artificial General Intelligence, while other predictions suggest we are seeing the first steps of an AI winter, with model collapse on the near horizon. This presentation will explore Generative Artificial Intelligence and its application in education from a critical studies and human rights perspective. It will identify and address many of the key myths, it will argue for a new trajectory, and will pose more questions about Generative AI and education than it answers.
