For the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town we are going back to Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the role of generative AI in representing history-related information. The vast volumes of historical information mean that AI is increasingly used to process such materials, and in recent years there has been a considerable increase in end-users engaging with AI chatbots to explore historical information.

But LLMs also generate new textual and visual content, which can make historical material more accessible but also raises questions about the fabrication of facts and information …

The final speaker ion this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jana Peters, whose paper compares opinion poll predictions related to the unexpected 2025 German federal election with predictions generated by ChatGPT. How reliable are AI-generated election polls?

This relates to concerns about the role of horse-race journalism coverage in shaping public opinion during election campaigns, as citizens’ encounters of such polls might lead them to shape their own voting intentions accordingly (variously through bandwagon or underdog effects, for instance). And election polls are themselves not necessarily reliable, although citizens tend to trust these …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hal Xu, whose interest is in the Democratic governance of artificial intelligence. To what extent do citizens participate in this process? Participatory governance is critical here, but there are few pathways towards this, and in countries like the US, citizen trust in government institutions is very low to begin with, further discouraging such participation.

There are two key structural asymmetries here: information asymmetry between AI providers and users; and power asymmetry between corporations, governments, and other elites on the one hand, and …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Michael Reiss, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on news consumption. Generative AI chatbots are now used in a wide range of informational contexts, including for exploring news topics; AI functionality is now also deeply embedded into search engines and other contexts.

At the same time, many people are actively avoiding the news, due to low levels of trust in the media, news overload, and other factors; will the growing role of generative AI also address news avoidance, then, as …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on AI and politics, and starts with a paper by Bohan Zhang and colleagues on AI-generate disinformation in the 2024 US presidential election. This election has been described as one of the first where AI content played a significant role; this included counterfeit AI video and audio on social media platforms.

Such content taps on existing political cynicism: this may both make some people more resistant to AI content due to their overall rejection of political propaganda, but also lead to others embracing AI content as …

The next speaker in the morning session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Veronica Batzendorfer, whose interest is in the Xitter-adjacent Grokipedia project as an ‘alternative’ to Wikipedia. Specifically, her focus is on semantic drift across Grokipedia’s versions, starting with material drawn in part from Wikipedia and then rewritten by LLMs.

Such semantic drift can be examined through a geometric framework. This works with two points in time and explores changes between them, across Wikipedia and Grokipedia; Wikipedia content serves as the training data for the LLM which generates articles for the Grokipedia, so …