Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging not merely as a technical development but as a phenomenon that is comprehensively transforming the social fabric. Large language models, generative AI systems and multimodal algorithms are appearing in quick succession, and the pace of change is testing the limits of societies' capacity to make sense of and manage this process. Indeed, a marked gap has opened up between the speed at which AI technologies are developing and the speed at which the ethical, legal and social frameworks governing them are maturing.

One of the areas where this gap is felt most acutely is communication and media, since AI is profoundly changing both the infrastructure and the content production dynamics of new media environments. Algorithmic content recommendations, automated text and image generation, personalized information flows and deepfake technologies are fundamentally reshaping the ways in which information is produced, circulated and consumed. This process directly calls into question the reliability and social function of new media, bringing issues such as disinformation, algorithmic bias and digital ethics to the center of the academic agenda.