With the rise of AI technologies in education, researchers have increasingly focused on exploring AI literacy. AI literacy refers to users’ competency in understanding, using, evaluating, and possessing ethics when they use AI technologies (Ng et al., 2021). In recent years, Generative AI (GenAI) tools (e.g., ChatGPT, MidJourney) have been increasingly developed and widely used for learning purposes (Fang et al., 2024; O’dea et al., 2024; Ng et al., 2024a). Prior research has shown evidence that using these tools can positively enhance students’ learning outcomes and engagement. For example, GenAI can instantly respond to prompts inputted by students, which can inspire their learning motivation, creativity, problem-solving, metacognition and self-regulation abilities (Fang et al., 2024; Fang & Deng, 2024a, b; Kohnke et al., 2023). However, ChatGPT’s responses and recommendations may not be appropriate or consistent. As such, students need additional higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, and creation to adopt these recommendations for their learning tasks (Ng et al., 2023). In addition, students practice their multimodal learning by using texts, images, audio, and videos via GenAI tools (Liu et al., 2024). All these require students’ AI literacy to adopt ChatGPT meaningfully in their study. To explore GenAI literacy and its impacts, a timely review of relevant studies is essential for gaining a comprehensive understanding of its development and effects in educational research.