Generative artificial intelligence represented by ChatGPT has attracted wide attention in the field of education because of its powerful generative ability, both personalized learning, understanding the learner’s motivation, and providing personalized tutoring and feedback for education. With the advent of the Education 2.0 era, smart classroom has become a strategic choice for the construction of education modernization, and is widely used in higher education and vocational education. Generative AI enlightens students’ engineering thinking, computational thinking, design thinking and systems thinking, which not only helps students to master their professional courses, understand what they have learned, and improve their academic performance, but also assists teachers in updating their course content, keeping abreast of students’ learning trends, improving their teaching efficiency, and simplifying their work. However, generative AI is faced with expertise gaps and uncertainty about the existence of generated content in its application, as well as ethical issues, and this study proposes that the needs and values of education should be respected, with the aim of efficient and convenient services, and that data-driven and ethical ethics should be emphasized in future development. Smart classroom and enlightened thinking with the application of generative AI is a new way of thinking about educational change, which can help teachers and students to effectively carry out multiple interactions, enable teachers to better understand students, play the role of human beings in education, and truly allow technology to be used for teaching and promote classroom teaching reform.