News (2)

On 16 June 2026, Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto) joined the ComAI Lecture series at the Bremer Presse-Club. Grohmann is Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies), co-lead of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster, and leader of the DigiLabour initiative. His talk, “Worker-led AI Governance in Cultural Industries,” asked how cultural (…)

Date: Friday, July 24, 26Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 PM (CEST)Format: Online via Zoom – https://lmu-munich.zoom-x.de/j/69013752224?pwd=gPpl3YaHMtn7TQu8J2z39e5wtTT0Sa.1 (Meeting-ID: 690 1375 2224 | Kenncode: 680823)Language: German On Friday, July 24, 2026, the ComAI and DISELMA research units will host a joint research colloquium. The colloquium will take place online via Zoom. External guests are very welcome to (…)

A blog post by Andreas Hepp Anyone who, as a non-American, currently wants to work with Anthropic’s latest language model, Claude Fable 5, has, since Saturday German time, been receiving the message that the model is “currently unavailable.” Behind this lies an export control imposed by the US government, under which all foreign nationals are (…)

A blog post by Andreas Hepp Visions of possible futures with AI appear to vary significantly across different cultural contexts. In Silicon Valley and its pioneer communities, these visions are heavily driven by the possibilities of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) or “superintelligence” and the challenges of “AI safety,” as we are currently investigating through media (…)

On the 10th and 11th of June the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society is organizing the 8th annual Weizenbaum Conference in Berlin. Named after AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, it convenes research from various disciplines on the societal impacts of digitalisation, featuring transdisciplinary discussions.  This year’s conference focuses on the topic of Generative AI (GenAI) (…)

On 28 and 29 May 2026, the interdisciplinary workshop “Von Gegenwartsanalysen zum Futuring. Methods for the Future-Oriented Generation of Practice and Knowledge” took place at the Haus der Wissenschaft in Bremen – a joint event organised by the ComAI research group (FOR 5656) and the Sociology of Knowledge section of the German Sociological Association (DGS). (…)

On 28 May 2026, the ComAI research group gathered for its quarterly meeting at the Haus der Wissenschaft in Bremen. The highlight of the event was an open talk by Mercator Fellow Axel Bruns, who, together with Katherine M. FitzGerald and further co-authors, has published the article “Just Asking Questions”: Doing Our Own Research on (…)

The 76th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) will take place from June 2 to 8 in Cape Town, South Africa. This year’s conference is themed “Communication and Inequalities in Context” and will bring together over 2,900 researchers in the field of communication studies. Members of ZeMKI and the ComAI research group will (…)

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 (…)