This paper provides a descriptive history of AI chatbots and an overview of current debates surrounding their use in higher education informed by a structured narrative literature review of 50 academic articles. It aligns with the conference’s call for retrospectives, retrocomputing homages and EdTech histories while also contributing to strands related to critical AI literacies, practices and conceptual frames of learning and technology. The paper contributes an informative and impartial briefing for colleagues who hold a wide spectrum of views related to AI in education.

The paper describes the functionality and applications of early AI chatbots in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s such as ELIZA and SCHOLAR before examining debates relating to the visual design elements of chatbots in the 1990s followed by the impact of Generative AI on chatbot design in the 2020s. The paper gives an overview of current definitions and taxonomies relating to AI and chatbots in the GenAI era to provide a foundation for colleagues to understand contemporary discourses. The paper then describes some of the benefits and challenges of AI chatbots through the concept of the pharmakon (an ancient Greek word for something that is both a remedy and a poison) (Wegerif and Casebourne, 2025)¹ to conceptualise the potential impact of AI on education.

The paper also looks at the challenges of developing robust frameworks for evaluating educational AI chatbots due to a lack of empirical studies and issues that arise from using pre-existing approaches such as the Technology Acceptance Model in this domain. The paper concludes by examining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbots and some of the emerging approaches for evaluating the pedagogical impact of this technology. The accompanying presentation will give an overview of these aspects using clear diagrams, screenshots and historical examples to provide attendees with an engaging and approachable briefing to this field of research.

1. Wegerif, R., & Casebourne, I. (2025). A dialogic theoretical foundation for integrating generative AI into pedagogical design. British Journal of Educational Technology.