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Governance: Private ordering of ComAI through corporate communication and policies (ComAI P4)

  • Duration: 2025 – 2028
  • Project lead: Prof. Dr. Christian Katzenbach

In this project we investigate private ordering as one dimension of ComAI’s sociomaterial constitution with regard to corporate communication and policies in the context of public controversies, focusing on Germany, UK and US.

The project thus investigates the ways in which corporate strategies and product policies of companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and OpenAI as well as public controversies contribute to and negotiate what ComAI products are and how they are governed.

  1. How is the ordering of ComAI portrayed and politicized in public controversies?
  2. How do companies position ComAI as a product? What are the policies and terms of services that industries enforce for using them?
  3. What are the policies and terms of services that industries enforce for using them?
  4. Which is the role of private ordering in the sociomaterial constitution of ComAI?
  5. And how is ComAI’s agency negotiated and attributed in all this?

These five questions will be investigated across four conversational bots and artificial companions (Alphabet’s Bart and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon’s Alexa and a further case yet to be determined) by using both qualitative and quantitative (computational) content analyses of public material as well as interviews with company representatives.

Publications:

  • Bareis, J., & Katzenbach, C. (2021). Talking AI into Being: The Narratives and Imaginaries of National AI Strategies and Their Performative Politics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 47(5), 855–881. doi:10.1177/01622439211030007
  • Dergacheva, D. & Katzenbach, C. (2023a). Mandate to overblock? Understanding the impact of European Union’s Article 17 on copyright content moderation on YouTube. Policy & Internet. doi:10.1002/poi3.379
  • Dergacheva, D. & Katzenbach, C. (2023b). “We learn through mistakes”: perspectives of social media creators on copyright moderation in the European Union. Social Media + Society. doi: 10.1177/20563051231220329
  • Gorwa, R., Binns, R., & Katzenbach, C. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance: Big Data & Society, 7(1), 1–15. doi:10.1177/2053951719897945
  • Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Dreyer, S., Jarke, J., Kannengießer, S., Katzenbach, C., Malaka, R., Pfadenhauer, M. P., Puschmann, C., & Schulz, W. (2023). ChatGPT, LaMDA, and the Hype Around Communicative AI: The Automation of Communication as a Field of Research in Media and Communication Studies. Human-Machine Communication, 6, 41–63. doi: 10.30658/hmc.6.4.
  • Hofmann, J., Katzenbach, C., & Gollatz, K. (2017). Between coordination and regulation: Finding the governance in Internet governance. New Media & Society, 19(9), 1406–1423. doi:10.1177/1461444816639975
  • Katzenbach, C. (2017). Die Regeln digitaler Kommunikation. Governance zwischen Norm, Diskurs und Technik. Springer VS. doi:10.1007/978-3-658-19337-9
  • Katzenbach, C. (2018). There Is Always More Than Law! From Low IP Regimes To A Governance Perspective In Copyright Research. Journal of Technology Law and Policy, 22(2): 99-122. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-55704-7
  • Katzenbach, C. (2021a). “AI will fix this” – The Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication. Big Data & Society, 8(2), doi:10.1177/20539517211046182
  • Katzenbach, C., Kopps, A., Magalhães, J. C., Redeker, D., Sühr, T., & Wunderlich, L. (2023). The Platform Governance Archive v1 – A longitudinal dataset to study the governance of communication and interactions by platforms and the historical evolution of platform policies [Data Paper]. doi:10.26092/ELIB/2331
  • Katzenbach, C., & Ulbricht, L. (2019). Algorithmic governance. Internet Policy Review, 8(4). doi:10.14763/2019.4.1424
  • Mager, A., & Katzenbach, C. (2021). Future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: Multiple, contested, commodified. New Media & Society, 23(2), 223–236. doi:10.1177/1461444820929321
  • Richter, V., Katzenbach, C., & Schäfer, M. S. (2023). Imaginaries of artificial intelligence. In S. Lindgren (Eds.), Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 209–223). Edward Elgar Publishing. doi:10.4337/9781803928562.00024

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