Project Details
Projekt
Governance: Private ordering of ComAI through corporate communication and policies
Applicant
Professor Dr. Christian Katzenbach
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516511468
In P5 we investigate private ordering as one dimension of ComAI’s sociomaterial constitution with regard to corporate communication and policies in the context of public controversies, focusing on Germany, UK and US. P5 thus investigates the ways in which corporate strategies and prod-uct policies of companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and OpenAI as well as public controver-sies contribute to and negotiate what ComAI products are and how they are governed. How is the ordering of ComAI portrayed and politicized in public controversies? How do companies posi-tion ComAI as a product? What are the policies and terms of services that industries enforce for using them? Which is the role of private ordering in the sociomaterial constitution of ComAI? And how is ComAI’s agency negotiated and attributed in all this? These five questions will be investi-gated across four conversational bots and artificial companions (Alphabet’s Bart and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon’s Alexa and a further case yet to be determined) by using both qualitative and quantitative (computational) content analyses of public material as well as interviews with company representatives.
DFG Programme
Research Units
