Encoding and decoding in the human–machine discourse

Abstract The emerging field of human–machine communication (HMC) research represents one of the most sustained efforts to bring communication research to bear on the social uses and consequences of artificial intelligence (AI), and yet HMC theory development is still in its early stages. Building on Stuart Hall’s seminal work about the encoding and decoding of television, this article presents a model that conceptualizes and operationalizes human–machine interactions in terms of their distinctive forms of encoding and decoding. Humans and machines take turns encoding and decoding each other, at a proliferating variety of interfaces, and through infrastructures extending across space and time. In the process, they also metacommunicate, about the discursive codes they each rely on, and about the social roles they occupy in shifting configurations. The encoding-decoding model provides a framework for further theory development about the co-creation of meaning and the exercise of agency by humans and machines.