Von der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion zur kommunikativen KI

Abstract

The objective of this article is to define more precisely the field of research into the automation of communication, which is currently only vaguely discernible. The central thesis is that, in order to be able to grasp the transformation of the media environment associated with the automation of communication, the view must be broadened from the “direct interaction of humans and machines” to “societal communication”. Broadening our perspective as such allows us to ask how the dynamics of societal communication as a whole change when “communicative AI” becomes part of societal communication. To support this thesis, the article first takes a closer look at the automation of communication as a phenomenon. Against this background, the concept of communicative AI is then developed in more detail as a “sensitizing concept” that sensitizes to both the breadth and depth of the phenomenon. On this basis, the bridging concept of the “hybrid figuration” is developed in order to grasp the agency of communicative AI and to be able to connect to “definitive concepts” of social science and media and communication research. It becomes apparent that with communicative AI as a field of research, the basic concepts of communication and media research—“communication” and “media”—are themselves challenged. The article is concluded by a conclusion that shows the research perspectives resulting from such an approach.

Space Sex-Machines: trans-planetary ethics and the mediatization of things

“…This transition to analyse new ecosystems is forcing an update of the classic (and ironic) mediation of everything (Livingstone, 2009) to the opening of new fertile discussions about the geographic dimensions of media (Fast, et al, 2017), as much as building bridges between the European and the Latin American traditions (see Scolari, Fernández & Rodriguez-Amat, 2021); and more recently Benz, Hepp, & Kirschner, 2022). The conceptual uplift in mediatization research includes the distinction between general and applied mediatizations (Scolari & Rodriguez-Amat, 2018), as well as the publication of new edited volumes (Kopecka-Piech & Bolin, 2023) or intrepid explorations to the deep mediatization (Hepp, 2019), and human-machine interaction and artificial intelligence (Hepp, Loosen, Dreyer, et al, 2022), or the incorporation of robots as objects of media and communication studies (Hepp, 2020) and their networked character (Duller & Rodriguez-Amat, 2021). The new frontier for these explorations is dealing with objects and humans in a complex mesh of interactions.…”