What do we know about generative AI and learning?

Abstract

Nancy Butler Songer from the University of Utah discusses what we know about generative artificial intelligence and its impact on learning. Generative AI (GenAI) is artificial intelligence (AI) that emerged as a mass-market in 2022 and uses machine learning and enormous datasets to manufacture content based on user- generated prompts. As a subset of AI systems, GenAI models use analysis and pattern recognition to generate what Emily Bender and Alex Hanna describe as ‘synthetic’ outputs (2025). The content can consist of text, images, video, audio, computer code, or all of these.