Introduction to the Special Section on Integrating Generative AI in Education

Excerpt

In March 2023, four months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, we proposed this special issue/section to explore the burgeoning field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in education. As major technology companies began investing heavily in GenAI, its applications started permeating educational settings, beginning with higher education institutions and trickling down to K-12 learning environments. By mid-May 2024, OpenAI unveiled its most advanced model, ChatGPT-4o (omni). This model includes enhanced multimodal capabilities, allowing it to process a mix of text, audio, image, and video inputs, and produce outputs in the form of text, audio, and images with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency (OpenAI, 2024). A day later, Google’s release of Gemini 1.5 marked a major advancement in language model capabilities. Notably, the model features a groundbreaking context window of up to 1 million tokens (Google, 2024). The increased memory capacity allows for retaining and referencing a much larger volume of previous dialogue or text inputs. This capability enhances contextual understanding and supports the generation of more detailed and comprehensive responses. The rapid advancement of GenAI has led to the incorporation of new applications and modalities into GenAI every day. …