This study examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) research in physical education is undergoing theoretical reconfiguration. Although prior scholarship has emphasized methodological innovation and technological diffusion, AI’s implications for the field’s theoretical architecture remain undertheorized. Drawing on the Theory Biography Framework (TBF), we conceptualize AI-related scholarship not as a sequence of technical applications but as a relational process reconfiguring theoretical structures. Theory is understood as a dynamic constellation of concepts that stabilize, extend, and recontextualize through patterned interactions. To investigate this process, we analyze 97 peer-reviewed articles (2021–2025) published in KCI-indexed journals using interpretive coding and relational analysis. Five phases—adoption, hybridization, institutionalization, expansion, and evolution—trace a trajectory from exploratory and ethics-oriented engagement toward deeper theoretical integration, methodological consolidation, cross-domain extension, and normative reframing. Rather than signaling a paradigmatic rupture, the findings suggest an incremental yet cumulative reordering of the field’s theoretical ecology. By shifting attention from thematic diffusion to theoretical movement, this study positions TBF as a process-oriented meta-theoretical lens and reframes AI as a generative force reshaping the field’s conceptual foundations.
Kim et al. (Thu,) studied this question.