Award for innovative achievement at the DGPuK-ICA conference

(25.09.2025) Anne Mollen, Sigrid Kannengießer, and Anastasia Glawatzki have been awarded the prize for the "Best Innovative Contribution" by the Digital Communication division of the German Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (DGPuK) and the ICA's Human Machine Communication (HMC) division. The award was presented on September 16, 2025, during the joint conference "Machines as (new) actors in digital communication: challenges and opportunities for science and society" held by the DGPuK and ICA in Dresden.

The award-winning paper is titled "The materiality of HMC: Imagining sustainable AI infrastructures" and explores the sustainability of generative AI in the context of human-machine communication. At the heart of the research lies the question of how organizations that develop generative AI imagine the sustainability of their infrastructure.

In their presentation, the authors argued that research on human-machine interaction should consider the materiality of generative AI as a complementary research perspective - particularly when addressing ethical issues. Using the example of designing sustainable AI infrastructure, the researchers demonstrated how the negative ecological, social, and economic impacts of generative AI can be located within its infrastructure.

Based on an analysis of websites and documents from 28 AI-developing organizations, the team investigated how these notions of AI sustainability manifest in "socio-technical imaginaries". The results show that sustainability is rarely explicitly mentioned and, if it is, often highlights the role of AI in promoting sustainability. When sustainability is imagined with regard to AI itself, this occurs primarily as a principle of technological progress rather than as a normative framework for a more socially, ecologically, and economically just AI.

The research highlights that, in the practice of AI development, a comprehensive perspective on the infrastructure of generative AI and its sustainability is lacking. Sustainability is not imagined as a normative orientation point for developing generative AI, leading to a very limited perspective on designing more sustainable generative AI.

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