Artificial Intelligence

And the final speaker in this entertaining session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Junbin Su, whose interest is in algorithmic gatekeeping in AI news recommendations. What values guide such gatekeeping decisions?

Conventional journalistic gatekeeping reflects editorial decisions about news values, and a number of competing lists of such news values have been proposed over the decades. Algorithmic gatekeeping may build on these values, or introduce others – not least also linked to platform metrics like user engagement or shareworthiness. This might under- or overemphasise certain news values.

This study explored this by identifying some 100 news recommender …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Timothy Koskie, looking for media pluralism in AI-generated local news. But actually, these systems are not necessarily artificial intelligence in the full sense of the term: they are simply content generators. These systems feed on media content, and will make mistakes as they do so; this is not necessarily all that different from human-driven news media, however.

But how do AI content generators fit into the media ecosystem? Can they contribute to media pluralism, and thereby increase the media ecosystem’s health? If so, this could considerably …

The next speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Jiawei Dai and Mengyao Liu, whose interest is in human perceptions of AI. These are often shaped in a socialised manner: different cognitive frameworks will affect how people perceive AI, and what relationships they form with AI technologies. Heuristic processing provides one explanation for this: this focusses on easily noticeable and understandable cues.

Users might perceive AI chatbots as human-like, and engage with them accordingly; in fact, there are lower social expectations about how AIs might react to human users, and humans might therefore engage in …

The first full session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts for me with a session on algorithmic media, which kicks off with Susanne Eichner. She notes the impact of digitisation on the fragmentation, individualisation, personalisation, and automation of media and users; this has led to research in critical data studies (focussing on the datafication of users and the surveillance capitalism that results from it), as well as in more user-oriented approaches that also acknowledge users’ datafied agency and resistance to such datafication.

How might we bridge these two seemingly opposed logics that variously see audiences as helpless or …

And the final speakers at the Bots Building Bridges workshop project are Mathias Orlikowski and Tony Veale, who begin by noting that bots can have a positive impact on online discussion by facilitating an increase in viewpoint diversity. Such bots might emphasise rational debate, but could also introduce more humorous perspectives.

One example of a polarised debate in Germany is the ongoing discussion about the introduction of a stricter speed limit on German freeways; in online discussions about this, a discussion bot could intervene by presenting an opposite point of view. Some such arguments could be pre-written responses to well-known …

The next speakers at the Bots Building Bridges project workshop are Zlata Kikteva and Arthur Romazanov, representing the DeLab (or Deliberation Laboratory) team at the University of Passau. Their team has developed a bot to take on moderation tasks.

This builds on research by members of the team on how humans moderate online discussions, which has explored key moderation strategies – soft moderation such as probing for elaborations, tone policing, social norm policing, agenda control, fact-checking, inviting experts top contribute; as well as hard moderation such as removing content and users from the discussion.

But can we delegate such moderation …

The next speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Ozgur Can Seckin and Bao Truong, who begin by outlining the issue of political polarisation – especially in the United States. They distinguish between polarisation on specific issues on the one hand, and affective polarisation between the partisans supporting various political groups on the other; this latter form of polarisation is therefore a problem of in-group and out-group exposure and engagement.

Some approaches have sought to address this by increasing exposure to out-group content and perspectives; some have attempted to encourage people to imagine the views of the other …

The workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld continues with a final session for today, which starts with Christian Grimme. His focus is on the role of AI in creating as well as fighting artificial communication. Artificial agents – bots – are not new, of course: there were email bots, Twitter bots, and there are many other forms of social bots, which are now also increasingly integrated with and driven by Large Language Models. There are also prosocial bots which are used to counter more problematic bots.

Automation can mean various things, though. Closed-loop systems use feedback mechanisms …

I’m in Berlin this week for the annual conference of the excellent Weizenbaum-Institut, which opens with a keynote by the great Claes de Vreese, whose keynote asks whether citizens are ready for an AI democracy (it won’t surprise anyone that the short answer is No). Democracy and politics are rapidly transforming at the present moment; democracy is under threat from populist and far-right movements and various other actors, and there are widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world. In a reversal of trends in the 1990s and 200os, the number of true democracies in the world is shrinking …