Generative artificial intelligence is increasingly reshaping contemporary communication by participating not only in the production and circulation of information but also in the interpretation through which meaning is constructed. While existing scholarship has extensively examined generative AI in relation to automation, governance, ethics, bias, and organisational adoption, comparatively less attention has been devoted to explaining how AI reorganises communication as a process of collective interpretation. This article addresses that theoretical gap by extending David Cecchetto’s (2022) account of the afterlife of data towards what is conceptualised as the afterlife of AI.
Adopting a conceptual theory-building approach, the article develops an integrated communication-theoretical framework comprising interpretive infrastructures, communicative overreliance, and synthetic consensus. Interpretive infrastructures describe the communicative environments within which AI-generated explanations, summaries, and recommendations increasingly mediate human interpretation. Communicative overreliance explains how interpretive labour is progressively redistributed across human and computational actors, while synthetic consensus identifies one possible communicative consequence in which shared reliance upon AI-mediated interpretation influences the formation of collective agreement. The framework further argues that although interpretation increasingly becomes collaborative, communicative accountability remains fundamentally human and institutional.
The article contributes to communication theory by demonstrating that generative AI represents a historical transition from infrastructures that primarily organise information to infrastructures that increasingly organise interpretation itself. By repositioning AI as an emerging communicative condition rather than merely a technological tool, the framework extends existing scholarship on digital mediation and provides a conceptual foundation for future research on interpretation, communicative authority, consensus, and accountability in increasingly AI-mediated environments.