Artificial Intelligence

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Giota Alevizou, whose interest is the role of online encyclopaedias in establishing epistemic authority. This role goes back to the early enlightenment period, in fact, when printed encyclopaedias first provided apparently authoritative knowledge, but also contributed to information overload.

But online encyclopaedias – chiefly, Wikipedia – are also under considerable threat now; this is in part because of its limited and shrinking contributor and editor base, a continuing lack of support from academia, and the threat of exploitation by AI. Every era finds a …

And the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented by Matthias Kast and Martin Bürger, exploring the way that communicative AI technologies are being discussed in the German news media, with particular focus on the frames, actors, and topics.

New technology is often presented as either threat or progress, and various risk and progress frames can be defined here; a more general frame might also be identified. Their co-occurrence with actors and topics in communicative AI news coverage is also important to examine.

The study examined some 3,800 articles from …

I was the next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, presenting our study exploring how various communicative AI chatbots respond to a range of old and new conspiracy theories. This has also already come out as an article in Media and Communication:

Katherine M. FitzGerald, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, and Daniel Angus. “'Just Asking Questions': Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots.” Media and Communication 14 (2026). DOI: 10.17645/mac.11337.

Here are the slides for our presentation:

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is by Inbal Klein-Avraham and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari; their focus is on multiple documents literacy: the ability to work with multiple content sources to evaluate information. This involves content evaluation, source evaluation, and corroboration or triangulation of information from trustworthy sources.

Exposure to conflicting texts creates a cognitive conflict which demands resolution; AI chatbots are increasingly used to help with such processes, but this requires new approaches. The key issue here is to allocate epistemic authority (to persons, institutions, or technologies), to support informed decision-making …

The final session for me at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is one in which I’ll present myself, but we start with a paper by Evelyn Jonas. Her focus is on the use of communicative AI to deal with opinion-challenging information. Users are frequently exposed to such information in online environments, of course, and this can create cognitive dissonance as well as more active information-seeking actions.

But traditional search engines are not the only way that this is addressed, and are not always helpful in identifying reliable sources; increasingly, people are also using AI chatbots to …

For the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town we are going back to Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the role of generative AI in representing history-related information. The vast volumes of historical information mean that AI is increasingly used to process such materials, and in recent years there has been a considerable increase in end-users engaging with AI chatbots to explore historical information.

But LLMs also generate new textual and visual content, which can make historical material more accessible but also raises questions about the fabrication of facts and information …

The final speaker ion this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jana Peters, whose paper compares opinion poll predictions related to the unexpected 2025 German federal election with predictions generated by ChatGPT. How reliable are AI-generated election polls?

This relates to concerns about the role of horse-race journalism coverage in shaping public opinion during election campaigns, as citizens’ encounters of such polls might lead them to shape their own voting intentions accordingly (variously through bandwagon or underdog effects, for instance). And election polls are themselves not necessarily reliable, although citizens tend to trust these …