CS2060 Communication in the Age of Generative AI

This course equips you to understand and critically navigate how generative AI is reshaping communication, media, and public life. You will explore how synthetic text, images, audio, and video are transforming meaning-making, persuasion, credibility, authorship, cultural production, public discourse, and political communication, while examining the opportunities and risks these systems create for communication practice and society. Designed for communication students, the course moves beyond technical or tool-based understandings of AI to focus on enduring communication concepts and questions that remain relevant even as platforms and applications change. By combining foundational theory with the analysis of contemporary cases, the course enables you to build a stable foundation for analysing emerging developments in generative media as synthetic media and as systems of public communication. Through the study of key ideas and real-world cases, the course develops your critical, ethical, and analytical understanding of communication in the age of generative AI, and prepares you to engage thoughtfully with the communicative, social, and professional implications of synthetic media, including questions of evidence, authenticity, inequality, labour, governance, and regulation.