Grassroots Insights on Integrating AI in Education​: What Do Public Sentiment and Perceptions Offer?​

The impact of the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been perceived as both transformative (Crompton & Burke, 2024) and disruptive (Lim et al., 2023) in the field of education. Specifically in language education, scholars (Kohnke & Zou, 2025) and organizations like British Council (Edmett et al., 2024) or TESOL (Curtis et al., 2024) advise caution about critical challenges that GenAI brings, especially about data privacy, equity, and its ethical use. Relatedly, understanding the concerns of users about those challenges becomes crucial. Our research examines the language use of teachers, learners, and parents, as major user groups, to understand how they perceive and “knowledge” GenAI, that is, how they engage in an epistemological process of recognizing and evaluating signs regarding GenAI (Goebel, 2013). As a space for grassroots knowledging (So et al., 2024), we examined viewer comments on TED Talks featuring AI in education broadcast on YouTube. Combining interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and sentiment analysis, we explore the corpus to identify epistemological and sentimental stances. While IPA was useful to explore how users made sense of major events in their lives (Smith et al., 2022), sentiment analysis, a natural language processing method, allowed us to examine opinions and evaluations of GenAI on social media (Liu, 2022). Our findings demonstrated that all three groups included tech-pessimist and optimist views and provided conditional support, which aligned with the mixed sentiment across groups. They indicated concerns about equitable access and GenAI’s perceived disconnection with real life. Crowdknowledging GenAI provided critical insight regarding shortcomings of the current education system, such as curricular challenges, addressing emerging teaching/learning skillsets, and fostering social-emotional learning essential with the so-called “inevitable” integration of GenAI. As two language educators, we discuss this general grassroots insight and its implications on language education to address the challenges ahead.