The public release and surprising capacity of ChatGPT has brought AI-enabled text generation into the forefront for educators and academics. ChatGPT and similar text generation tools raise numerous questions for educational practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. We begin by first describing what large language models are and how they function, and then situate them in the history of technology’s complex interrelationship with literacy, cognition, and education. Finally, we discuss implications for the field.