Short Interview with Mercator Fellow Axel Bruns

ZeMKI is pleased to welcome a new addition: Prof. Dr. Axel Bruns has recently joined the “Communicative AI” (ComAI) research group as a Mercator Fellow. Having come to Bremen from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, he brings a fascinating perspective on our digital world.

In his current research project and his talk at the ComAI Lectures, he debunks outdated notions of “the one” public sphere and demonstrates how algorithms truly shape our communication today. The following interview provides a brief insight into his work.

You are a Mercator Fellow at ZeMKI. What exactly does this role entail, and how did you become part of the ComAI research group?

I’ve been following the work of ZeMKI and ComAI for years, of course, and I actually gave a ComAI talk back in 2024 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJP4a5l4ikI). There are quite a few points of connection, particularly through the Australian Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (http://admscentre.org/), in which the Digital Media Research Centre (https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/) at Queensland University of Technology—where I normally work—plays a key role, and with which ComAI members are also affiliated.

The Mercator Fellowship is, of course, a great honor for me and an excellent opportunity to further deepen these connections. Over the next few months, I hope to learn a great deal about the current state of research at ZeMKI and ComAI and to further integrate this with the work of my colleagues and myself at DMRC and ADM+S; I look forward to many one-on-one and group discussions and would also like to present more of our work. My talk at the ComAI Lectures is a first step in this direction, and I expect other opportunities will arise as well.

As a visiting researcher, I naturally want to be of service to ZeMKI and ComAI above all—so with that in mind, here’s a call to my colleagues here: please let me know what I can do for you!

What exactly are you working on during your time in Bremen, and what insights do you hope to gain from interacting with your local colleagues?

We are, of course, all very interested in examining both the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence, particularly in the field of communication. This remains a field that is evolving rapidly, for better or for worse: on the one hand, the use of AI opens up new possibilities for research, as I also mentioned in my 2024 lecture; especially when analyzing larger datasets, there is a lot that can be done, as long as AI is used as a supplement and not as a replacement for the work of human researchers.

On the other hand, however, the use of AI in and for communication also poses new risks: for example, my colleagues and I recently published a new study (https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.11337) in which we examined the responses of AI chatbots to questions about relevant conspiracy theories. The picture here is very mixed: Chatbots like Perplexity do try to defuse such questions and direct users to corrections and fact-checks, but others—and here especially Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok—sometimes even explicitly help questioners find relevant resources for conspiracy theorists. And ours is just one of many studies addressing such issues—the question of AI’s role in society and its regulation by lawmakers is becoming increasingly urgent.

I hope to have many constructive discussions about both these positive and negative developments during my time in Bremen, and I would be happy to explore opportunities for further collaborative research. In addition, I’ll of course be seeing some old acquaintances here again: together with colleagues like Cornelius Puschmann, I edited the book Twitter and Society (https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/47764) more than a decade ago—a work that has since become something of a reminder of better times—and I’ve also maintained long-standing connections with many others. I’m curious to see what the current projects are here!

Your talk at the ComAI Lectures is titled “Revisiting ‘the’ Public Sphere and Its Algorithmically Shaped Publics” What is the key message you hope to convey to the Bremen community through your talk?

This is a topic I keep coming back to: to be perfectly honest, I’ve never really been able to warm up to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere—especially in its English translation—and applying it to our current communicative realities is more than difficult. In the age of social networks, the “public sphere” is no longer a sphere or arena truly focused on central mainstream media; nor does socially relevant communication and opinion-forming still take place primarily in a truly public setting due to the increased use of commercial platforms; nor, therefore, is there just one public sphere in our platformed and fragmented communicative world. And the shaping of communication and information flows by algorithms—and now also by artificial intelligence—further complicates this complex situation.

My approach here is, first and foremost, pragmatic (https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtad007): Beyond normative notions, what do we know about the structure of this network of large and small, more public and more private, short-lived and long-lived, organically and/or algorithmically curated, interwoven, and overlapping communicative groupings that, depending on their format, can represent groups, publics, communities, or formations with different dynamics? First and foremost, there is a need for clearer definitions so that we can better grasp and describe these phenomena and better understand their interactions. This will hopefully be particularly useful for the next generation of researchers, as many of the concepts our discipline has long relied on are now only applicable to the current and emerging world of communication with significant limitations.

Here is more information about Axel Bruns’ ComAI Lecture.