CONCEPT
Artificial Communication
The form of communication in which a machine provides information and utterance while the human provides understanding—Elena Esposito’s Luhmannian reframing that dissolves the question “does the machine think?” and replaces it with the one that matters: how do AI-generated communications alter the conditions under which social systems reproduce themselves?
Artificial communication is
Elena Esposito’s term for the communicative form that AI introduces into social life. In
Luhmann’s tripartite model, a communication is constituted by the synthesis of three selections: information (what is communicated), utterance (how it is expressed), and understanding (how the communication is received and connected to further communications). Crucially for Luhmann, the constitutive moment is understanding—the communication is completed at the destination, not the source. A statement that no one understands is not a communication; a statement that someone understands, regardless of its origin, is one. AI systems provide information and utterance at unprecedented scale and fluency; the understanding still occurs in receiving human consciousness. This makes AI a communicator in any sense that is
operationally relevant to social systems—its outputs enter legal systems, scientific systems, economic systems, and art systems and are processed there as communications, altering the conditions under which those