The Generative Turn in Communication: Feedback, Adaptation, and Responsibility

Generative AI reorganizes communication by turning reception into a resource for subsequent production. This recursive structure concentrates interpretive power in institutions that can learn from users while leaving users little access to how their conduct shapes later outputs. This editorial uses recursive asymmetry as an organizing lens for interpreting that unequal relation. The nine articles show how feedback becomes embedded in generative infrastructures, how recipients are converted into informational inputs, and how corrective labor is displaced downstream after harm occurs. Responsiveness may therefore expand without corresponding reciprocity, while verification and repair fall to actors with limited authority over the learning process. The resulting governance problem extends beyond disclosure and output quality. Accountable generative communication depends on whether the processes that convert response into future communication remain legible and contestable to those whose conduct sustains them.