The 6th edition of the International Conference “Communication in Action:
From Theory to Practice and Back"
November 19th-21st 2026, Iași, Romania
The central theme of CIA 2026 is:
Competing with Synthetic Work:
Redefining Human Agency
in an AI-Driven Communication Landscape
The public release of large language models in 2022 was accompanied by a discourse that portrayed
these technologies primarily as instruments for enhancing human productivity and creativity. Much
less attention was devoted to the possibility that they might fundamentally alter the conditions
under which creative labour is performed. Mastery of AI tools was widely promoted as a way to
enhance creative work by reaching superior outcomes with unprecedented efficiency. A dominant
narrative insisted that those who failed to embrace artificial intelligence would soon be replaced
by those who learned to work with it proficiently. By contrast, the prospect that human agents
themselves might be displaced by artificial ones, or increasingly constrained by AI-mediated work
processes, received comparatively little scrutiny. Within the communication and marketing
industries, practitioners remained confident that their contribution would continue to be
indispensable, given the empathy, contextual awareness, and strategic judgment required for the
development of PR and advertising materials that would be truly valuable. Synthetic outputs
generated by artificial agents were generally assumed to be insufficient in meeting the expectations
of clients, audiences, and stakeholders.
The years that followed challenged many of these assumptions. As synthetic content became
increasingly normalized across the communication and creative industries, it came to be regarded as
good enough for a wide range of marketing purposes. More importantly, it also served to
legitimize growing expectations that communication professionals deliver more with substantially
fewer resources. Organizations began allocating less time to the research and revision phases of the
creative process and reduced the number of people involved in the development of PR and advertising
campaigns. The underlying assumption was that if AI could assist with most stages of content
production, the professional role could be reduced to the curation and supervision of
machine-generated (synthetic) outputs. In practice, however, this supervision proved far more
demanding than anticipated. AI systems frequently generated inaccurate, misleading, or entirely
fabricated information, failed to maintain a consistent brand voice, reproduced existing content
from other sources, or produced recommendations that were poorly suited to their intended audiences.
Consequently, the verification of AI-generated content emerged as a new and complex professional
responsibility, requiring multiple layers of editorial review, fact-checking, and contextual
evaluation. At the same time, managers and clients often allocated less time to precisely those
activities that became increasingly necessary. Although the full costs of the failures that ensued
remain to be assessed, a growing number of incidents have already attracted media attention or
resulted in legal disputes, demonstrating that synthetic fictions can, and do, have
real-life consequences.
Today, communication professionals from a wide variety of sectors (from business to charity, from
governmental agencies to NGOs) find themselves navigating a landscape increasingly defined by the
paradoxes of AI use. A recent example is the fact that a growing number of digital platforms and
content-distribution systems appear to penalize content perceived as synthetic (AI-generated) while
rewarding texts that exhibit recognizable markers of human authorship. The production of content
that appears “less AI and more human” has consequently become associated with a set of
often vague and inconsistently defined criteria intended to signal authenticity, individuality,
imperfection, and human presence. Yet many creators report a striking paradox: genuinely
human-authored texts are increasingly being flagged by AI-based detection systems as sounding
excessively synthetic. In response, the strategic introduction of imperfection into human-generated
content is emerging as a new direction in communication practice: many professionals are now making
efforts to sound a bit clumsier, a bit more spontaneous, and a bit less polished in their writing.
At the same time, AI development itself is taking an unexpected turn, with growing efforts devoted
to designing automated tools capable of “humanizing” synthetic texts. The result is a
communication landscape in which human agents need to navigate multiple constraints and have
difficult choices to make regarding their relationship with AI tools: should they try to use these
tools better, or should they focus on developing the skills and activities that can be saved from
any AI intrusions?
We invite scholars and practitioners to critically reflect on the challenges and opportunities of
competing with synthetic work by addressing one of the following topics:
Track 1. Competing with Synthetic Work in Professional Communication
- Upskilling directions for PR, journalism, branding, and advertising professionals;
- Personal branding strategies for human creators versus AI influencers;
- Understanding AI overreliance in digital content creation and distribution;
- Developing guidelines for proper verification of AI outputs.
Track 2. Competing with Synthetic Work in Interpersonal Communication
- Trust and privacy issues in chatbot-mediated interactions;
- Misuse and abuse of AI in therapeutic and counseling settings;
- Human perception of AI agents as a significant other (friend, partner, trusted advisor);
- AI applications in customer service and caregiving contexts.
Track 3. Competing with Synthetic Work in Developing Various Types of Discourse
- AI-related risks and opportunities for literary and journalistic discourse genres;
- Changes in political discourse under the new AI-related pressures;
- The development of scientific discourse with and around AI tools;
- Emerging forms of discourse based on the collaboration between human and synthetic agents.
Track 4. Competing with Synthetic Work through AI Governance and Regulation
- Protecting user rights in the context of unsolicited AI personalization of search results;
- Understanding distributed authorship and intellectual property in synthetic outputs;
- Designing review mechanisms prior to the deployment of new AI tools;
- Expanding legal requirements for AI interfaces to prevent misleading chatbot outputs.
Track 5. Competing with Synthetic Work in the field of Communication Science: Rethinking Education, Research, and Higher Education Policies
- Redefining higher education curricula to prioritize human skills that AI cannot replace;
- Conceptualizing how artificial agents alter theory-building and research methodologies within the field of Communication Science;
- Understanding institutional tensions surrounding generative tools, including the rise of plagiarism and the structural failures of automated AI-detection software.
Applications should include the title of the proposed contribution, an abstract, and 5 to 7
keywords. Templates for abstracts and full papers are available on the conference website (www.fssp.uaic.ro/cia). Contributions
may be submitted in English or French.
Authors whose papers are accepted for presentation at the conference will be invited to deliver a
15-minute presentation in English or French. Each presentation will be followed by a 10-minute
session dedicated to comments, questions, and further discussion.
Plenary Speakers
Professor at Paul Valéry University of
Montpellier 3
France
Professor in Communication Sciences at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Salerno, Department of Political and Social Studies.
Vice President (Academic), at Gisma University of Applied Sciences.
ORGANISERS
Organiser
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi
is the oldest higher education
institution
in Romania.
Organiser
The Institute for Advanced Religious Studies and Internetworking Communication
Organiser
Gisma University of Applied Sciences
German International Graduate School of Management and Administration
Organiser
The Department of Political and Social Studies (DISPS)
from the University of Salerno (UNISA)
