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Pioneer Communities: Imagining ComAI and its possible futures (ComAI P1)

  • 2025 – 2028
  • Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp

Subproject of the DFG/FWF Research Unit "Communicative AI" (ComAI)

Taking historical developments at Stanford University and MIT as well as today’s developments at OpenAI (GPT-4) and Aleph Alpha (Luminous) as examples, P1 focuses on ComAI’s pioneer communities: groups who create “social horizons” for future development through their imaginative and experimental practices.

P1 combines a historical perspective on earlier pioneer communities and tech movements as their contextual figurations, a perspective on the current influences of both, and a perspective on pioneer communities’ contribution to the spread of ComAI. The analysis is guided by four research questions:

  1. How did tech movements and pioneer communities prefigure today’s ComAI?
  2. What characterizes their imaginaries of ComAI and their influence on current ComAI developments?
  3. What do pioneer communities contribute to the spread of ComAI?
  4. What role do pioneer communities play in the sociomaterial constitution of ComAI?

To answer these research questions, P1 uses a mixed-method design analyzing historical sources, media discourses, interviews, observations, and online-networks in Germany, the UK and the US.

Publications:

  • Hepp, A. (2016). Pioneer communities. Media, Culture & Society, 38(6), 918-933. doi: 10.1177/0163443716664484
  • Hepp, A. (2020a). Artificial companions, social bots and work bots. Media, Culture & Society, 42(7-8), 1410-1426. doi:10.1177/016344h3t7tp2s0:/9/d1o6i.4o1rg2/
  • Hepp, A. (2020b). Deep mediatization. London: Routledge.
  • Hepp, A. (2020c). The fragility of curating a pioneer community. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(6), 932-950. doi:10.1177/1367877920922867
  • Hepp, A. (2022). Jenseits der Disruption. KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 74, 231-255. doi:10.1007/s11577-022-00835-6
  • Hepp, A., & Loosen, W. (2021). Pioneer journalism. Journalism, 22(3), 577-595.
  • Hepp, A., & Loosen, W. (2022). Beyond innovation. In P. Ferrucci & S. Eldridge (Eds.), The institutions changing journalism: Barbarians inside the gate (pp. 118-135). London: Routledge.
  • Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Dreyer, S., Jarke, J., Kannengießer, S., . . . Schulz, W. (2022). Von der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion zur kommunikativen KI. Publizistik, 67(4), 449-474. doi:10.1007/s11616-022-00758-4
  • Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Dreyer, S., Jarke, J., Kannengießer, S., . . . Schulz, W. (2023a). ChatGPT, LaMDA and the hype around Communicative AI. Human-Machine Communication, 6, 41-63. doi:10.30658/hmc.6.4
  • Hepp, A., Schmitz, A., & Schneider, N. (2023b). Afterlives of the Californian Ideology. IJoC, 17, 4142-4160. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/21405

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