The prevalence of speech assistants taking orders, social bots influencing debates, and machines generating texts underscores the increasing sophistication of automated communication. Simultaneously, public discourse on these phenomena reflects the ongoing challenges associated with the automation of communication. It seems that the intricacies of today’s complex societies compel a reliance on automation to meet communication needs, while also generating additional issues for which automated communication appears to be the most plausible solution.
Research in nine projects plus coordination project
The “Communicative AI“ Research Unit, funded by the DFG and the FWF, is investigating in nine projects and one coordination project how societal communication changes when communicative AI becomes part of it. Top researchers from the fields of media and communication studies, informatics, sociology and law are involved. The research focuses on pioneer communities, the development of interfaces, the legal handling and governance of communicative AI, its role in journalism, in public (online) discourse, in everyday personal life through technological companions, in the health sector and in learning and teaching.
Members of the ComAI research unit are organizing a half-day workshop at CUI in Bremen to explore the use of human-like pragmatic cues — such as tone of voice, backchanneling, and conversational repair — in conversational agents across different domains. As of now, such cues are often blindly mimicked by models rather than being strategically (…)
On 26 May 2026, Prof. Dr. Simone Natale (University of Turin) visited the Bremer Presse-Club to deliver a talk as part of the ComAI Lecture Series, drawing on his recent article “AI, Agency, and Power Geometries” (Media, Culture & Society, 2025). Natale opened with a fundamental paradox: AI is a global phenomenon, yet it is (…)
As part of the ComAI Project P1 “Pioneer Communities: Imagining ComAI and its Possible Futures”, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp has published the article “The Imaginative Landscape of AI: Locating Silicon Valley’s ‘quiet futuring’” in the Media, Culture & Society Journal. The article is open-access and is freely available to everyone. The article’s key arguments are: (…)
Michaela Pfadenhauer (P7) was invited as a guest speaker at the “Health in Society” lecture series at the University of Vienna. In a dialogue-based format, she and sports scientist Assoc. Prof. Barbara Wessner discussed artificial intelligence both from their respective disciplinary perspectives. With her presentation “Communicative AI in the field of support: AI companion apps (…)
It is not the typical opening question for researchers, but for Jonah Wermter and Antonia Eichenauer from the project “Journalism: Automating the News and journalistic Autonomy”, that was precisely how many interesting conversations began. At re:publica in Berlin, one of the largest and most important conferences on digital media, politics and society, they set up (…)
As part of their research on AI companions in the personal sphere Michaela Pfadenhauer, Marvin Waibel, and Andrea Heisse are conducting interviews with experts on AI companion apps. The project aims to analyze the communicative form of AI companionship and to examine how it is realized in app design and interaction. The following interview was (…)
On 21 May 2026, the ComAI research group’s Working Group on Diversity & Gender Equity launched its new internal Lecture Series. The inaugural session featured an input talk by Katharina Mosene from the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) and the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), on AI, discrimination, (…)
There are plenty of concerns and fears when it comes to how communicative AI is appropriated in journalism. To capture these, the project “Journalism: Automating the news and journalistic autonomy” has adopted a familiar tool often used in classrooms: the suggestion box. In this case it is a colourful box into which visitors to re:publica, (…)
On 14 April, ComAI team members Leonie Winterpacht and Sara Skardelly (from the subproject “Health: Caring through ComAI”) took part in the Innovation Forum, organized by the Centre of Innovation at St Monica Trust in Bristol, UK. The annual forum brings together residents, innovators, researchers, and care providers who are interested in the future of (…)
Earlier this year, Sara Skardelly, from the subproject “Health: Caring through ComAI”, spent six weeks as a PhD visitor at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab (ETLab) at Monash University and joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). The visit strengthened her methodological toolkit in visual ethnography and deepened her engagement (…)
The ComAI research group (FOR 5656 »Communicative AI«) and the Knowledge Sociology Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS) warmly invite you to the interdisciplinary workshop “Von Gegenwartsanalysen zum Futuring. Methods for the Future-Oriented Generation of Practice and Knowledge”. The workshop will take place on 28 and 29 May 2026 at the Haus der Wissenschaft (…)
On May 5, 2026, Gabriela Molina León visited the ComAI Lecture series. A postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University (Denmark) working at the intersection of information visualization and human-computer interaction, she presented three projects on the role of generative AI in data visualization. The first, Hey Dashboard!, introduced DIANA (Dashboard Interactive Assistant for Navigation and Analysis), (…)
6. May 2026
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp
ZeMKI, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research
University of Bremen