Generative AI in Education: Perspectives Through an Academic Lens

In this paper, we investigated the role of generative AI in education in academic publications extracted from Web of Science (3506 records; 2019–2024). The proposed methodology included three main streams: (1) Monthly analysis trends; top-ranking research areas, keywords and universities; frequency of keywords over time; a keyword co-occurrence map; collaboration networks; and a Sankey diagram illustrating the relationship between AI-related terms, publication years and research areas; (2) Sentiment analysis using a custom list of words, VADER and TextBlob; (3) Topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Terms such as “artificial intelligence” and “generative artificial intelligence” were predominant, but they diverged and evolved over time. By 2024, AI applications had branched into specialized fields, including education and educational research, computer science, engineering, psychology, medical informatics, healthcare sciences, general medicine and surgery. The sentiment analysis reveals a growing optimism in academic publications regarding generative AI in education, with a steady increase in positive sentiment from 2023 to 2024, while maintaining a predominantly neutral tone. Five main topics were derived from AI applications in education, based on an analysis of the most relevant terms extracted by LDA: (1) Gen-AI’s impact in education and research; (2) ChatGPT as a tool for university students and teachers; (3) Large language models (LLMs) and prompting in computing education; (4) Applications of ChatGPT in patient education; (5) ChatGPT’s performance in medical examinations. The research identified several emerging topics: discipline-specific application of LLMs, multimodal gen-AI, personalized learning, AI as a peer or tutor and cross-cultural and multilingual tools aimed at developing culturally relevant educational content and supporting the teaching of lesser-known languages. Further, gamification with generative AI involves designing interactive storytelling and adaptive educational games to enhance engagement and hybrid human–AI classrooms explore co-teaching dynamics, teacher–student relationships and the impact on classroom authority.