The commonly used Media Equation framework in human-machine communication research exhibits limitations when explaining human-machine relationships in the AI era, giving rise to the Media Evocation paradigm. Based on the Media Evocation framework, this study employs in-depth interviews to investigate whether interactions between humans and the in-car robot Nomi are mindful or mindless, while also examining whether these interactions prompt reflections on the machine’s ontology. The findings indicate that most participants perceive Nomi as a human-like actor and interact with it mindfully. High quality social cues, such as voice and facial expressions, can trigger mindful anthropomorphic responses in human-machine interaction, eliciting behaviors such as decorating the robot and projecting emotions onto it. Most participants regard Nomi as occupying a hybrid social role, akin to a combination of a pet and a friend, and perceive it as an independent entity rather than one that is reliant on humans. Mindfulness and mindlessness exhibit variations in distinguishing criteria, triggering conditions, and fundamental characteristics. Discussions of the ontology of machines need to be situated within specific relationships and contexts, reflecting dynamic, complex, and variable characteristics.

This article investigates the diffusion and adoption of ChatGPT among college students from a multinational convenience sample, informed by the scholarly literature on the diffusion and progressive appropriation of ChatGPT by students and teachers within the education sector and the strategies adopted by academic institutions. We applied a figurational approach to this study, offering two theses that try to understand the societal meaning of ChatGPT diffusion in the educational sector. Operationally, we explored university students’ behavioral intentions, practices of use, and opinions toward ChatGPT in five countries (China, Italy, Kenya, Uruguay, and the United States of America) through an online survey. Results indicated that: (1) students seem to be cautious or resist the hype of generative intelligence; (2) an essential cultural pattern emerges: American and Italian students are more pessimistic toward ChatGPT, whereas Chinese students, sometimes accompanied by Kenyan and Uruguayans students, are more optimistic; (3) men and techno-scientific students are more positive toward ChatGPT than women and socio-humanistic students.

Artificial intelligence is central to solutionism—the vision of a world where all major problems are solved through technology. This study theorizes about how human–AI communication shapes attitudes toward AI and influences the formation of public opinion, sparking solutionist imaginaries. We empirically examine the attitude formation resulting from the non-simulated use of an unmanipulated conversational model in a controlled laboratory experiment. Using a between-subjects design, participants engaged in three semi-structured 20-minute sessions with ChatGPT, providing a novel perspective on the effects of its use. The findings reveal that mere use of ChatGPT causally increases AI acceptance; however, its impact significantly depends on how the system is used. Especially non-instrumental, guided exploratory usage activates the solutionist imagination and leads to greater AI acceptance. This study demonstrates that specific types of AI engagement can shape public attitudes toward AI, including the development of uncritical beliefs about its future capabilities.

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 8.

Humans adapt their communication style when interacting with one another. With interactive technologies such as voice assistants taking over the role of an interaction partner, the question arises whether and to what extent humans also adapt to their communication style. The adaptation could have a grounding function, ensuring efficient communication with the current interaction partner, or be based on priming which could endure and influence subsequent interactions. In a pre-registered experimental lab study, 133 participants interacted with a voice assistant whose communication style varied regarding politeness (polite vs. non-polite) and machine-likeness (machine-like vs. natural). Participants’ verbal behavior during and in a subsequent communication situation was analyzed. Politeness as well as machine-likeness adaptation was observed during the interaction but not afterwards, supporting the grounding hypothesis. Furthermore, the adaptation process appears to be unconscious as the voice assistant’s different communication styles did not affect conscious evaluations.

Considering possible impediments to authentic interactions with machines, this study explores contributors to robophobia from the potential dual influence of technological features and individual traits. Through a 2 x 2 x 3 online experiment, a robot’s physical human-likeness, gender, and status were manipulated and individual differences in robot beliefs and personality traits were measured. The effects of robot traits on phobia were non-significant. Overall, subjective beliefs about what robots are, cultivated by media portrayals, whether they threaten human identity, are moral, and have agency were the strongest predictors of robophobia. Those with higher internal locus of control and neuroticism, and lower perceived technology competence, showed more robophobia. Implications for the socio-technical aspects of robots’ integration in work and society are discussed.

This study examines the role of voice-based assistants (VBAs), specifically Alexa, in the mediatization paradigm framework. The authors hypothesize that emerging technologies such as chatbots and VBAs intensify the process of online meta-reintermediation of news. Three research questions were investigated through a questionnaire administered to 655 university students in the US and Italy: Do participants try to get news from Alexa? Are participants aware that VBAs represent a case of meta-reintermediation of news? Does Alexa contribute to the potential hybridization of news, information, and knowledge? The analysis of 451 open-ended answers showed that only a fraction of participants searches for news and information from Alexa, and most are unaware of the meta-reintermediation process. However, the use of Alexa contributes to the potential hybridization of news, information, and knowledge, making the mediatization process increasingly complex and hard to decipher by users.

In this introduction to the fourth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the nine articles selected for inclusion.In this essay, we aim to frame some crucial psychological, sociological, and cultural aspects of this field of research.In particular, we situate the current scholarship from a historical perspective by (a) discussing humanity's long walk with hybridity and otherness, at both the cultural and individual development levels, (b) considering how the organization of capital, labor, and gender relations serve as fundamental context for understanding HMC in the present day, and (c) contextualizing the development of the HMC field in light of seismic, contemporary shifts in society and the social sciences.We call on the community of researchers, students, and practitioners to ask the big questions, to ground research and theory in the past as well as the real and unfolding lifeworld of human-machine communication (including what HMC may become), and to claim a seat at the table during the earliest phases in design, testing, implementation, law and policy, and ethics to intervene for social good.

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Although Žižek appropriates this term from Jacques Lacan, he develops the concept in a unique way that exceeds Lacan’s initial psychoanalytic formulations. The second and third parts will demonstrate how the machine constitutes the symptom of moral philosophy, showing how and why it comprises the always already excluded element necessary to define the proper limits of moral subjectivity. The fourth part will then consider two alternatives that promise, but ultimately fail, to accommodate this symptom. And the final section will draw out the consequences of this analysis for ethics and its excluded others.