Onto-epistemological understandings of generative artificial intelligence in education

Over the past decade, the growth in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping and changing how we interact, learn, and workand is likely to bring ongoing change in the future. However, currenteducational understandings, frameworks, and models concerning digitaltechnologies and digital literacies are remaining relatively static and hierarchical and donot adequately accommodate GenAI’s unique learningcapabilities, creative potential, and agency. In this conceptual article, we use critical dialogic inquiry and employ ecological thinking using thenotion of symbiosis and posthuman perspectives to explore and speculate about the nature of GenAI and its potential impact on educators andlearners. We offer a new way of conceptualizing human relationships with GenAI, which we call“symbi(AI)tic understandings.”Symbi(AI)ticunderstandings acknowledge the evolving and contextual relationships between partners: from balanced mutualism to one-sided commensalismto potentially harmful parasitism. Thus, we position human–GenAI relationships as part of change futures in which there are complexassociations between technology and human endeavor. These understandings aim to foster more nuancedways of being with and thinkingabout technology: ways which are vital for educators and learners as they transition into an era of education with AI.