The rapid development of AI has driven educational innovation. The Education Power Strategy (2024–2035) emphasizes improving teachers' digital literacy, while the 14th Five-Year Plan for Sports Development supports digital technology in sports education. ChatGPT is reshaping pre-service PE teachers' learning, covering sports science, education, psychology, and interdisciplinary theories. This study explores the effectiveness and risks of ChatGPT in professional learning, aiming to promote its responsible application and provide theoretical support. Method: (1) Using the literature review method to collect relevant research on the empowerment of physical education teachers, providing a theoretical basis for this study. (2) Design a semi-structured interview outline to conduct interviews with 5 undergraduate and 5 graduate physical education teachers from the School of Physical Education at Zhengzhou University. (3) Based on grounded theory, NVIVO14 software was used to analyze transcribed interview texts. Through tagging processing, 146 tagged nodes were generated, and 32 concepts were extracted from the 146 tags, which were ultimately classified into 9 categories. (1) The effectiveness of ChatGPT in empowering pre service physical education teachers to learn professional knowledge include: ChatGPT can broaden professional knowledge learning channels and improve learning efficiency, but the accuracy of ChatGPT generated results is difficult to guarantee; Graduate students are more inclined than undergraduate students to use ChatGPT to enhance their self-learning ability and use it for academic research; (2) Risk: Overuse can lead to reliance on ChatGPT, personal information leakage, and the use of ChatGPT can easily trigger academic misconduct; (3) Optimization strategy: Schools and physical education teachers should provide pre service physical education teacher training on the correct use of ChatGPT, and preservice physical education teachers should actively consider professional knowledge related issues before using ChatGPT to improve their ability to think proactively. (1) Preservice physical education teachers generally recognize the positive role of ChatGPT in professional knowledge learning. (2) There are risks of dependency, academic misconduct, and information leakage. (3) It is recommended that teachers master the correct usage methods and avoid excessive dependence. Schools should establish relevant regulations and be guided by teacher educators to apply them reasonably. This study confirms the educational potential of ChatGPT while revealing its usage risks. Due to limitations in sample size and technological development, future research can be expanded to different educational environments and combined with multiple assessment methods.
Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.