ComAI featured in taz: Researching Societal Communication in the Age of AI

The research group “Communicative AI” (ComAI) has been featured in a recent article by taz – die tageszeitung. The piece explores the central question of our project: How does societal communication change when Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes a part of it?

The article highlights the interdisciplinary research conducted by ComAI, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The group brings together experts from communication and media studies, human-computer interaction, sociology of knowledge, governance research, and media law to examine the impact of communicative AI in various societal contexts – from journalism and public discourse to healthcare communication and legal frameworks.

In the article, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp (ZeMKI, University of Bremen) emphasizes the importance of this research: “Many believe that without communicative AI, we face economic disadvantages. Others see it as the downfall of humanity. Either way, we must invest in understanding what is happening.”

Rather than acting as an emergency response to crises, ComAI positions itself as a forward-looking initiative, dedicated to researching, critically evaluating, and actively shaping the societal transformation driven by communicative AI.