Artificial Intelligence as a Printing Press Moment: Ontological Parallelism and the Future of Communication Theory

Artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally transforms who communicates and how meaning circulates. Yet the field risks missing this inflection point by treating AI as merely another empirical context for existing frameworks rather than as a phenomenon exposing those frameworks’ limitations. This commentary argues that AI reveals ontological parallelism—the tendency for communication research to address emerging phenomena through isolated paradigmatic lenses that coexist without meaningful dialogue. While pluralism has historically strengthened the field, parallelism becomes a liability when a phenomenon simultaneously occupies multiple ontological categories. AI functions as tool, medium, agent, and infrastructure at once, collapsing distinctions that organize communication scholarship itself. We advance three interconnected claims: (1) AI represents fundamental transformation demanding paradigm shift and theoretical innovation, not incremental extension; (2) AI amplifies three long-standing disciplinary misalignments between micro and macro theory, methods and theory, and humanistic and scientific traditions, pushing these contradictions toward crisis; and (3) this crisis requires reconsidering what binds communication scholarship as a coherent field when the phenomena that defined us no longer hold stable meanings. Communication research contains the conceptual foundations needed to address AI, but only through explicit ontological positioning and movement from parallelism toward productive pluralism. The choice is whether to apply familiar frameworks in parallel or let AI’s ontological challenge drive theoretical innovation while reconstituting field identity.