{"title":"A critical review of AI in accounting education: Threat and opportunity","authors":"Joan Ballantine , Gordon Boyce , Greg Stoner","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102711","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this essay, we contribute to the limited literature that has critically examined the potential implications of generative AI on the accounting academy and accounting education (AE). We argue that the recent accelerated growth of AI, especially large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raises significant issues and challenges that the accounting academy needs to urgently address to survive in the long term. Developments in AI have, we suggest, created a ‘change-inducing crisis’, presenting a unique opportunity for accounting academics to address the uncritical and problematic functionalist view of the discipline and the technical reductionism of accounting. Our arguments represent a call for action to embrace AI in learning and teaching practices in a way that brings about a renewed focus on the human dimension of accounting, incorporating broader social and critical perspectives, thereby addressing longstanding calls for change in AE to move beyond the technical, managerial, and financial focus (core of the AE curriculum) that has dominated the discipline for many decades. Accounting academics have a fundamental role to play in recognising the nature of the threats and the associated challenge of AI and to seize the opportunities available in ways that bring both critique and <em>being critical</em> to the fore. However, to bring about the sort of change we argue for in this essay, the accounting academy has to lead to ‘take education back from the market’ and provide the impetus that can make accounting education more relevant to our students <em>and</em> the needs of contemporary society.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 102711"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235424000108/pdfft?md5=842ec6fe52473c567ab7d893e9d5a052&pid=1-s2.0-S1045235424000108-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235424000108","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In this essay, we contribute to the limited literature that has critically examined the potential implications of generative AI on the accounting academy and accounting education (AE). We argue that the recent accelerated growth of AI, especially large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raises significant issues and challenges that the accounting academy needs to urgently address to survive in the long term. Developments in AI have, we suggest, created a ‘change-inducing crisis’, presenting a unique opportunity for accounting academics to address the uncritical and problematic functionalist view of the discipline and the technical reductionism of accounting. Our arguments represent a call for action to embrace AI in learning and teaching practices in a way that brings about a renewed focus on the human dimension of accounting, incorporating broader social and critical perspectives, thereby addressing longstanding calls for change in AE to move beyond the technical, managerial, and financial focus (core of the AE curriculum) that has dominated the discipline for many decades. Accounting academics have a fundamental role to play in recognising the nature of the threats and the associated challenge of AI and to seize the opportunities available in ways that bring both critique and being critical to the fore. However, to bring about the sort of change we argue for in this essay, the accounting academy has to lead to ‘take education back from the market’ and provide the impetus that can make accounting education more relevant to our students and the needs of contemporary society.
期刊介绍:
Critical Perspectives on Accounting aims to provide a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era. From such concerns, a new literature is emerging that seeks to reformulate corporate, social, and political activity, and the theoretical and practical means by which we apprehend and affect that activity. Research Areas Include: • Studies involving the political economy of accounting, critical accounting, radical accounting, and accounting''s implication in the exercise of power • Financial accounting''s role in the processes of international capital formation, including its impact on stock market stability and international banking activities • Management accounting''s role in organizing the labor process • The relationship between accounting and the state in various social formations • Studies of accounting''s historical role, as a means of "remembering" the subject''s social and conflictual character • The role of accounting in establishing "real" democracy at work and other domains of life • Accounting''s adjudicative function in international exchanges, such as that of the Third World debt • Antagonisms between the social and private character of accounting, such as conflicts of interest in the audit process • The identification of new constituencies for radical and critical accounting information • Accounting''s involvement in gender and class conflicts in the workplace • The interplay between accounting, social conflict, industrialization, bureaucracy, and technocracy • Reappraisals of the role of accounting as a science and technology • Critical reviews of "useful" scientific knowledge about organizations