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THEME: Parameters, Recalibrations, and Trajectories in AI-Aided Communication and New Media

While artificial intelligence (AI) is not anything new as philosophical discussions about it began prior to World War II, it is the advanced capacities of the scientific breakthrough that have sparked debates, drawn resistance from skeptics, and driven scholars and industry practitioners to sound the alarm. Image and speech recognition and algorithms may have rendered obsolete what used to be mechanical human activities facilitating faster transactions, mobilities, and processes in such fields as marketing, advertising, journalism, psychology, social media, business, among others. However, the same AI capacities have enabled unwanted collection of big data causing infringement on people’s privacy and ease of access to online behaviors.

The surge of generative AI tools in recent years appears to be a quick fix in a matter of seconds for just anything the limited outputs that the human mind and body can yield—a feat that used to be unimaginable. But then again, the accuracy and ethicality of the supra fast AI-aided activities raise issues on the limits of AI and the role of the individual in keeping standards. Where does the AI assistance end, and where does human work start?

In many communication and media environments, delineations between AI and human work are blurred, human labor is replaced with the cost-efficient and productivity-enhanced AI tools, and AI complements but sometimes supersedes human creativity. What awaits scholars and practitioners of communication, media, and other disciplines in the hyper-AI era remains to be seen. We invite you to converse with us as we try to navigate, interrogate, and project the inevitabilities of AI in communication and new media.

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