Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI | Call for Proposals

Social media platforms are increasingly shaped by the integration of generative AI alongside long-standing analytical and predictive models. Today’s algorithmic systems are moving from the background infrastructure to the forefront of digital social life – where autonomous AI agents operate in coexistence with (or independently of) human users.  They intervene in the content feeds as conversational agents like xAI’s Grok, reshape identity play through synthetic likenesses of OpenAI’s Sora-2, and expand the social ecosystem itself through experimental projects like Butterflies AI and Moltbook. As these developments rapidly outpace existing research frameworks, the need for mixed critical methodologies to explore the nested integration of GenAI into platforms grows more urgent.

The 2026 Autumn School edition of the CRC “Media of Cooperation” explores these developments by focusing on generative AI as an infrastructural, cultural, and regulated component of social media platforms across three intersecting dimensions: At the cultural level of everyday use, it refers to the routinized practices of prompting or interacting with platform-embedded generative systems through multimodal inputs. Infrastructurally, it signals a shift in agency, as platforms keep multiplying affordances that nudge us into co-producing synthetic outputs. Finally, it foregrounds research techniques for probing AI models in their entanglements with the platform governance and moderation regimes.

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2026.

This event will take place on September 22-25, 2026, hosted by the CRC Media of Cooperation, University of Siegen.

Full details can be found here.