Visions of Disciplinary and Education Futures with Generative AI

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) is permeating higher education, with varying implications across disciplinary contexts. Some impacts of GenAI may advance scholars' disciplinary visions, while others may challenge them. This qualitative interview study examined how 17 scholars across 15 distinct academic disciplines understand GenAI’s potential and existing impacts on teaching, research, and disciplinary practices, and what values and priorities might lead to variation in their disciplinary responses. We found that participants held several distinct stances about GenAI, sometimes many at once. There was a spectrum of stances, from resistance to skepticism, to neutrality stemming from inaction, to pragmatic stances of GenAI as a tool, or as a positively or negatively transformative disruptor. While there was no clear mapping from stance to discipline, we found that scholars within a discipline held particular commitments to knowledge and ways of knowing that varied in alignment or tension with pragmatic concerns of disciplinary progress and learning. The weighing between these two considerations often explained the valence of their stance. Throughout, scholars also noted the lack of capacity to develop their stances by learning and experimenting, as their time was increasingly consumed by increased workload, some from increased challenges in teaching caused by GenAI. These findings suggest that whether and how disciplines might be transformed by GenAI depend greatly on society's willingness to invest in capacity to create new, transdisciplinary cultures of knowledge that reconsider or recommit to what knowledge should be protected, taught, and sought.