The early wave of ChatGPT research: A review and future agenda

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly engaged in discussions about the hopes and fears of artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we critically examine the early scholarly response to one prominent form of generative and conversational AI: ChatGPT. The launch of ChatGPT has sparked a surge in research, resulting in a fast-growing but fragmented body of literature. Against this backdrop, we undertook a systematic literature review of 192 empirical articles about ChatGPT to examine, synthesize, and evaluate the foci and gaps in this early wave of research to capture the dominating and immediate scholarly reactions to ChatGPT's release. Our analytical focus covered the following main aspects: perspectives on the purpose, usage, attitudes, and impacts of ChatGPT, as well as the theories and methods scholars apply in studying ChatGPT. Most studies in our sample focus on performance tests of ChatGPT, highlighting its strengths in remembering, understanding, and analyzing content, while revealing limitations in its capacity to generate novel ideas and its hallucination habit. Although the initial wave of ChatGPT research has generated valuable first insights, much of this early research remains a-theoretical, descriptive, and narrowly scoped, with limited attention to broader social, ethical, and institutional implications. These patterns reflect both the rapid publication pace and the early stage of scholarly engagement with this emerging technology. In response, we propose a conceptual model that maps key focus areas of ChatGPT research and suggest ways of strengthening ChatGPT research by proposing a research agenda aimed at advancing more theoretically informed, contextually grounded, and socially responsive studies of generative and conversational AI.

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