Organizer: GET:ORG Communicative Organizing with Generative Technologies project
The world of communication is becoming a chimeric fusion of human and machine, characterized by synthetic things that are increasingly alive and disrupt existing dualisms (Suchman, 2007; Haraway, 1985). The technological development of LLM-based AI tools has produced semi-automated communicative AI agents, such as socialbots, capable of participating in conversations in a relatively human-like manner (e.g., Guzman & Lewis, 2020; Laaksonen et al., 2023). These agents are present in several social contexts communication scholars might be interested in — such as online environments, where human voices are increasingly accompanied by automated or synthetic voices (Hepp et al., 2023; Woolley & Howard, 2016). Overall, more and more social media images and other content originate from generative AI tools, often with poor quality (Smith & Southerton, 2025). More technically oriented fields have also discussed doing research with synthetic data, artificially generated data that mimic characteristics of real-world social data (Chim et al., 2025; de Seta et al., 2024).
It is thus clear that communication scholars have an increasing need to consider the presence of nonhuman communicators in their datasets. As Guzman and Lewis (2020) proposed, the emergence of communicative AI invites us to rethink functional, relational, and ontological questions related to communication. Specifically, the increasing amount of AI-generated and other kinds of synthetic communication demands additional considerations from methodological and epistemological perspectives. First, synthetic communicators and synthetic communication data challenge the selection of theories and methodologies that can be used to study them. Second, as technology advances, the identification of synthetic communicators from humans becomes increasingly difficult, which imposes serious epistemological issues.
In this workshop, we will discuss critical questions related to synthetic communication in empirical data, as well as speculate on various methodological and theoretical options for engaging with such material. The workshop begins with an introductory presentation by the organizers, which is followed by facilitated group discussions in the form of a data session. The aim is to both develop and learn from existing research ideas that utilize (partially) synthetic communication datasets.
We invite submissions of 150-300 words that describe the contributors’ (existing or potential) data with synthetic communication, and the research problem they are interested in via electric form by December 8, 2025. Contributors are also encouraged to think about questions or issues related to their dataset or research design to be discussed during the workshop. These questions can be either part of the submission text or sent via email to the organizers. For the workshop, participants are expected to provide an excerpt of their data to be discussed.
Contact person: Salla-Maaria Laaksonen salla.laaksonen@helsinki.fi