Imagining the future of artificial intelligence in education: a review of social science fiction

Figures & data

Table 1. Sources of fiction texts.

Collection and article titles	Number of fiction texts
Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape (Bozkurt et al. 2023)	66
Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come (Conrad and Wiebe 2022)	8
‘The Pandemic Will Not Be on Zoom’: A Retrospective from the Year 2050 (Costello et al. 2020)	1
AI and Robots in Higher Education: Eight Design Fictions (Cox 2020)	8
Brave New Platforms: A Possible Platform Future for Highly Decentralised Schooling (Hillman, Bergviken Rensfeldt, and Ivarsson 2020)	3
Imagining Education Futures: Researchers as Fiction Authors (Hrastinski and Jandrić 2023)	6
Students and Society in the 2020s. Three Future ‘Histories’ of Education and Technology (Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch 2020)	3
What Might the School of 2030 Be like? An Exercise in Social Science Fiction (Selwyn et al. 2020)	5
Total:	100

Table 2. Samples from the coding process.

Extract from fiction text	Code(s)	Subtheme	Theme
‘Jon knew that almost all of the work being submitted by students had in fact been produced by some sort of AI or other. If not the whole thing, then at least it had been co-written with natural language processing assistance.’ (Curcher 2023, 559)	Student submission, assessment integrity	Assessment	Education design
‘DocAI must know more about Foucault’s theories than Foucault himself. It is also up-to-date with all recent Foucauldian research and publications.’ (Lee in Bozkurt et al. 2023, 65)	Epistemological authority, knowledge accessibility	Epistemology	Education design
‘Those robots were cute, and I give you that. But some children got too attached, and they were inevitably disappointed when they understood the asymmetry of that friendship.’ (Fuentes-Martinez 2023, 556)	Emotional attachment to AI	Blurred realities	Social aspects
‘ … scorching heat that has parched the country due to Earth's climate change’ (Toquero in Bozkurt et al. 2023, 106)	Impact on nature	-	Sustainability

Figure 1. The four themes and their sub-themes that were identified through the thematic analysis.

Bozkurt, Aras, Junhong Xiao, Sarah Lambert, Angelica Pazurek, Helen Crompton, Suzan Koseoglu, Robert Farrow, et al. 2023. “Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape.” Asian Journal of Distance Education 18 (1): 53–130. http://www.asianjde.com/ojs/index.php/AsianJDE/article/view/709.

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Conrad, Diane, and Sean Wiebe. 2022. Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93827-7.

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Costello, Eamon, Mark Brown, Enda Donlon, and Prajakta Girme. 2020. “‘The Pandemic Will Not Be on Zoom’: A Retrospective from the Year 2050.” Postdigital Science and Education 2 (3): 619–627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00150-3.

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Cox, Andrew. 2020. AI and Robots in Higher Education: Eight Design Fictions. Sheffield, England: The University of Sheffield.

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Hillman, Thomas, Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt, and Jonas Ivarsson. 2020. “Brave New Platforms: A Possible Platform Future for Highly Decentralised Schooling.” Learning, Media and Technology 45 (1): 7–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1683748.

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Hrastinski, Stefan, and Petar Jandrić. 2023. “Imagining Education Futures: Researchers as Fiction Authors.” Postdigital Science and Education 5: 509–515. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00403-x.

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Macgilchrist, Felicitas, Heidrun Allert, and Anne Bruch. 2020. “Students and Society in the 2020s. Three Future ‘Histories’ of Education and Technology.” Learning, Media and Technology 45 (1): 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1656235.

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Selwyn, Neil, Luci Pangrazio, Selena Nemorin, and Carlo Perrotta. 2020. “What Might the School of 2030 Be Like? An Exercise in Social Science Fiction.” Learning, Media and Technology 45 (1): 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944.

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Curcher, Mark. 2023. “The Pseudo Uni.” Postdigital Science and Education 5: 558–560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00384-3.

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Fuentes-Martinez, Ana. 2023. “Memoirs of an Old Teacher.” Postdigital Science and Education 5: 556–557. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00382-5.

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