Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming deeply embedded in human communication, mediating artistic expression, professional correspondence, and everyday social interactions. These technologies do not merely generate content but alter the very structure of meaning-making, posing significant challenges to our ability to trust and interpret communication. While many critiques focus on AI’s role in creative labor displacement, this paper argues that AI’s true impact lies in its transformation of sign transmission itself. Increasingly, AI intervenes in human discourse by generating, filtering, and reshaping language, images, and ideas, sometimes without users’ explicit awareness. This results in a complex semiotic landscape where intent and authorship are no longer straightforward but distributed across human and machine agents. For the informed observer, this introduces a new layer of signification that must be actively parsed; for the unaware, it risks distorting perception in ways that may be imperceptible. Can authentic human communication still be said to exist in this mediated reality? To explore this, the paper proposes a modified semiotic framework that accounts for AI’s role in meaning production, examining how AI alters traditional models of sign transmission. This framework will be applied to contemporary AI-mediated interactions, offering a structured approach to understanding communication in the post-AI era.

Bertuzzo, Marco Luca, The AI between us: A semiographical analysis of the impacts of AI-mediated communication. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5397554 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5397554