The Leibniz Media Lecture by legal scholar Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker, LL. M. (Yale), on January 28 was a double premiere: Not only was it the first Media Lecture organized by the ComAI research group, but it was also the first public event held in the new premises of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research (…)

A new article by ZeMKI member Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp is being published as open access in a thematic issue of the International Journal of Communication (IJoC), edited by Christian Pentzold and Charlotte Knorr. The article, titled “Curating AI Into Being: Hacks/Hackers as Amplifiers of Journalism’s Digital Futures,” analyzes how the Hacks/Hackers network actively shapes the role of artificial (…)

As part of a workshop and an evening ComAI Lecture, media and communication scholar Mirca Madianou visited ZeMKI in Bremen. Across both formats, she presented and discussed key insights from her long-term research on digital technologies in humanitarian contexts, with a particular focus on power asymmetries, infrastructures, and the ethical implications of technological interventions. The (…)

Together, Rebecca Scharlach, CJ Reynolds, Vasilisa Kuznetsova, Blake Hallinan and Christian Katzenbach worked on a paper on value-driven AI governance. Here you can find the available preprint. About the paper: Values are omnipresent in AI regulation. State actors and AI companies alike emphasize commitments to values such as fairness and safety. Despite this seeming agreement, (…)

The current season of the podcast “Confirm Humanity – Epochenbruch”, produced by and released on Freies Radio Salzkammergut, is dedicated to key questions of digital transformation. Across five elaborately produced radio features, experts from different disciplines discuss the present-day epochal shift brought about by digitalization and explore how human interests, societal values, and democratic principles (…)

Our Fellowship Program invites international researchers to Bremen for four weeks to deepen and connect their research in the transformation of media, communication, and information. We are looking for established scholars who want to enjoy the thriving interdisciplinary research environment at ZeMKI. Disciplines include media and communication studies, computer science, film studies, educational science, studies (…)

The sociologist Dr. Laura Wiesböck heads the Junior Research Group “Digitalization and Social Transformation” at the Institute for Advanced Studies. She has received numerous awards for her work. In 2025, she published the book “Digitale Diagnosen: Psychische Gesundheit als Social-Media-Trend”. The publication received widespread acclaim (including from FAZ, Spiegel, and SRF Sternstunde Philosophie), reached number (…)

Our research group ComAI – Communicative Artificial Intelligence is represented at the international conference GenAI & Creative Practices: Past, Present, and Future, which will take place on 17–18 December 2025 at the University of Amsterdam. The conference brings together international scholars from media, cultural, social, and technology studies to discuss the social, political, and cultural (…)

On 25 November 2025, Prof. Dr. Taina Bucher (University of Oslo) visited ZeMKI as part of the ComAI Lectures. In her talk “Presenting AI: Slowing Down the Future”, she asked what gets lost when AI is imagined primarily as the engine of an ever faster, more efficient, and more “seamless” future: What disappears when everything (…)

On October 16, Jonah Wermter from Project 5, “ComAI and Journalism – The Automation of News and Journalistic Autonomy,” was invited to give a lecture as part of the SPIEGEL Group’s annual “AI Week.” In his presentation, Jonah spoke about the current state of research on AI in journalism, focusing particularly on patterns of appropriation (…)

Date: November 26, 2025 Time: 1:15 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. Address: Rooseveltplatz 2, 1090 Vienna Location: Seminar Room 3 (Institute of Sociology) Link: Communicative AI and Digital Companionship Speakers: Michaela Pfadenhauer, Andrea Heisse, and Marvin Waibel (P7) Abstract: Within the DFG and FWF-funded research group FOR 5656 “ComAI: The Automation of Social Communication,” the Vienna-based (…)