Critical Generative AI Literacy for Social Studies Educators: A Typology of GenAI Errors and Their Impacts on Epistemology

This conceptual article introduces a typology of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) errors relevant to social studies and geography education. Grounded in technoskepticism, it examines how GenAI’s probabilistic design can distort disciplinary reasoning and knowledge construction. This typology identifies five GenAI failure domains: Fabrication, Semantic, Flattening, Media Representation, and Contextual Offense errors that threaten disciplinary integrity. Each domain and its subtypes reveal how GenAI destabilizes four key epistemic lenses: Space, Time, Human Experience, and Societal Systems. This framework provides educators with a critical vocabulary to identify, anticipate, and critically evaluate GenAI oversimplifications and misrepresentations that undermine disciplinary knowledge within instructional contexts.