Research Group Artificial Intelligence and Datafied Communication (AIDa)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous in society. As computational agents gain the ability to act intelligently by learning from the data they encounter, they increasingly take on organizational capacities. Particularly when integrated with communication technologies. Hence, artificially intelligent technologies are shaping communicative processes - and doing so based on the data communicative processes produce.

Artificial Intelligence and Datafied Communication (AIDa) is a research group at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University that focuses on how the augmented integration of AI and data affects communication. We study technological developments and the application of digital tools in relation to meaning formation at the personal, organizational, and societal level. Our central concerns include, but are not limited to, the dual role that data plays in organising publics and as an issue of growing public concern; the integration of human and non-human actors in decision-making processes; the effects of intelligent computing on human agency in relation to professional discretion and ethical judgement. 

Seeking to avoid any presumptions about the normative value of digital technologies, we begin all empirical investigations from Kranzberg’s (1986) famous dictum that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Technologies have no predetermined value outside of their use, but human actors are not free to use available technologies as they please. Rather, various affordances hold different agential potentials, which are realised in and as specific actions when taken up by human and/or non-human agents. All action is sociotechnical; at AIDa we seek to understand the specific sociotechnical figuration of artificial intelligence and datafied communication.