A text-based artificial intelligence application called ChatGPT has sparked attention from all walks of life upon its launch, and its demonstrated value of educational innovation has been hotly debated in particular. Thanks to its advanced algorithms, powerful computing capabilities and massive data base, ChatGPT can learn on its own when interacting with users, thus intelligently providing Q&A, translation, writing and other services. In addition, the newly-released upgraded version of ChatGPT—GPT-4 can also better solve real-time problems, reason logically and write creatively. In the field of education, ChatGPT can be used as a teaching tool, answer professional academic questions, build autonomous learning platforms, save human resources costs, and reconstruct school education structures, providing many development opportunities for educational innovation. However, it also brings some risks and challenges, impacting the role of teachers, the goals of talent cultivation, the traditional school order, and exposes typical issues such as technological dependence, academic misconduct, and intelligent discrimination. Currently, technological renovation is pressing educational innovation step by step, which requires us to approach new technologies positively and cautiously, achieving self-reliance and strength in intelligent technology by strengthening organized scientific research, building a national digital security barrier through revising relevant laws, enhancing application service transparency by clarifying digital education standards, and transforming talent cultivation concepts to form flexible thinking in education evaluation. Based on all this, we must make every effort to create a new form of human civilization in the process of moving towards human-machine co-teaching.