Research project
Meaning making and information integrity in the age of AI
How is generative AI changing the way we learn, communicate, and make sense of the world today? As AI tools become part of everyday life, they don’t just produce text but shape meaning, influence trust, and impact how we find and share information. This project explores how people use, experience and talk about AI and how it affects their understanding of truth, language, and knowledge.
- Duration
- 2025 - 2026
- Contact
- Alina Karakanta
- Funding
- Birmingham-Leiden Strategic collaboration
- Partners
Department of Linguistics and Communication at University of Birmingham
Generative AI is transforming the way people communicate and produce knowledge, with profound changes in traditional knowledge-production fields such as journalism and translation. AI has the potential to reshape the day-to-day information seeking behaviour and language use of individuals and industries in a saturated digital media ecosystem. This has far-reaching implications for meaning making, cognition, information integrity and deliberative democracy, which hinges on how people consume information and the quality thereof. Because the effects of AI are so pervasive, they demand closer scholarly attention through a cross-disciplinary lens.
Our collaboration between the University of Birmingham’s Department of Linguistics and Communication and the Departments of Applied Linguistics and Digital Humanities at Leiden University addresses this need.
- We investigate public discourse around AI, particularly focusing on how AI is framed. We initiated a corpus-based study exploring the attitudes of different stakeholders (individuals, private companies, government bodies) towards AI based on public consultation letters on the US AI Action Plan.
- We are examining the impact of generative AI on meaning making and information integrity from the perspective of young people in the Netherlands and the UK through studies and surveys.
- We design AI-related activities that can be incorporated in classrooms and workshops to track students’ and participants' use of AI as well as their views, trust and perspectives.