Schools are increasingly grappling with challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies, exemplified by the omnipresence of chatbots and their repercussions for pedagogical practices. This paper explores the case of how ChatGPT unfolds in, and affects, students’ writing practices and what the implications are thereof. We conceptualise ChatGPT as a ‘thinking infrastructure’ that structures and affects attention, decision-making, and cognition. By researching two schools in Belgium and Germany, we discuss how students engage with ChatGPT when performing school tasks. Our analysis shows how ChatGPT affects students’ writing practices by generating habits, valuating knowledge, cultivating affinity, and prompting thought. This, we argue, illuminates shifts in what it means to be educated today. We suggest the need to further articulate the new conditions of learning emerging through GenAI technologies and propose the need for a pedagogy that fosters infrastructure literacy.

In this paper, we build upon this existing critical research through an in-depth empirical engagement with ChatGPT in students’ digital writing practices in schools—where writing is seen as a situated social practice that derives meaning from the space and time in which it occurs (Chala and Chapéton 2012). Therefore, we do not focus on discourses and hype surrounding ChatGPT, but on how it becomes a mundane (and ‘infrastructural’) part of everyday school practices. Education research has already extensively empirically highlighted how other technologies (e.g. platforms) unfold in and (re-)shape day-to-day school practices, yet in manifold and unpredictable ways (Alirezabeigi et al. 2020; Mörtsell 2024). However, our critical understanding of how such shifts unfold through GenAI technologies is still more limited (but see for previous discussions, for example, Fyfe 2023; Perrotta et al. 2024). This paper contributes to this existing gap by exploring how students in two different countries (Belgium and Germany) engage with ChatGPT when writing and how this ultimately makes particular forms of educational practice im-/possible (Wagener-Böck et al. 2023). We do this by first conceptualising ChatGPT as a thinking infrastructure that mediates everyday educational practices (Bowker et al. 2019)—with mediation referring to how technologies actively displace and modify a particular practice (Latour 1999). Next, we expand on the methodology developed to study ChatGPT as a thinking infrastructure while clarifying our rationale for researching two different national school settings. The article goes on by analysing four different mechanisms, operating in relation to each other, through which ChatGPT as a thinking infrastructure affects writing practices: generating habits, valuating knowledge, cultivating affinity, and prompting thought. Conclusively, we contend that the introduction of ChatGPT in digital writing practices illuminates emergent conditions of learning in schools, which necessitate re-imagining pedagogies of schooling. In this vein, we propose the pedagogical necessity for ‘infrastructure literacy’ (Gray et al. 2018).