‘The Classroom Robot’, by ChatGPT: Unpacking the Imaginary of the AIED Classroom Through an AI-Generated Story.

In this article, I explore the sociotechnical imaginary of the automated classroom, actualizing it through an AI-generated short fiction. Drawing on the cultural compression algorithm underlying LLMs, as well as the sociotechnically assembled character of contemporary imaginaries, I prompt ChatGPT to write a short fiction regarding a robot in a classroom, both reflecting on generative AIs’ participation in the (re)production of future imaginaries and pushing the methodological boundaries regarding the possible uses of AI in education and research. Building on this, I focus on ChatGPT’s fictional classroom as a discursive material space where the reductionist stance towards AIED materializes, parting into two irreconcilable albeit complementary attitudes: technosolutionism and the fear of automation. Combining poststructural textual analysis and critical discourse analysis as sensitizing frameworks, I unpack this reductionist view as the surface where more relevant issues emerge, such as the routinization of teachers’ work and the enforcement of a learnificated educational experience; the digital nudging of learners; the personalization frenzy; and the imperative to be fast in order to comply with the accelerated pace of life. Discussing such topics, which represent some of the key features of the postdigital classroom, as well as some of the main beliefs regarding educational futures, I interpreted ‘The Classroom Robot’ as a trivialization of educational technological change and a semiotic-spatial epitome of what we expect, dread, or hope for the future of education.