Keyword: onto-epistemology

ABSTRACT: ver the past decade, the growth in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping and changing how we interact, learn, and work and is likely to bring ongoing change in the future. However, current educational understandings, frameworks, and models concerning digital technologies and digital literacies are remaining relatively static and hierarchical and do not adequately accommodate GenAI’s unique learning capabilities, creative potential, and agency. In this conceptual article, we use critical dialogic inquiry and employ ecological thinking using the notion of symbiosis and posthuman perspectives to explore and speculate about the nature of GenAI and its potential impact on educators and learners. We offer a new way of conceptualizing human relationships with GenAI, which we call “symbi(AI)tic understandings.” Symbi(AI)tic understandings acknowledge the evolving and contextual relationships between partners: from balanced mutualism to one-sided commensalism to potentially harmful parasitism. Thus, we position human–GenAI relationships as part of change futures in which there are complex associations between technology and human endeavor. These understandings aim to foster more nuanced ways of being with and thinking about technology: ways which are vital for educators and learners as they transition into an era of education with AI.