Interactivity under generative AI: a systems-theoretical analysis of media transformation

Purpose This article reconceptualises interactivity as a systems-theoretical concept grounded in the distinction between form and medium. It clarifies how interactivity should be understood not as interaction or reciprocity, but as the technologically organised conditioning of communicative continuation, and analyses how this configuration is transformed under conditions of generative AI. Design/methodology/approach The article reconstructs Luhmann's sociology of communication, media and technology as an integrated analytical framework. Interactivity is reinterpreted through the interactivity typology of Bordewijk and van Kaam as programme configurations understood as condensed decision premises. On this basis, the concept of technological media formation is developed to analyse how media condition communicative form-building across sociomedia evolution, from language and inscription to digital infrastructures and generative systems. Findings Interactivity designates the relation between communicative form-building and its technologically conditioned medium. Across sociomedia evolution, decision premises progressively condense from socially enacted constraints into mechanised, automated and infrastructural configurations. Earlier digital interactivity stabilised continuation through deterministic programme architectures. Generative AI introduces a non-trivial technological media formation in which probabilistic computation conditions the generation of selectable proposals without participating in communicative meaning formation. This transformation reorganises transmission, consultation, conversation and registration by shifting programmes from deterministic stabilisation to stochastic conditioning. Interactivity increasingly approximates interaction experientially, while communicative closure remains intact. Originality/value The article contributes (1) a form-theoretical reconstruction of interactivity within systems theory, (2) a sociomedia-evolutionary account of technological media formation and (3) a conceptual clarification of generative AI as non-trivial technological automated media formation. It thereby provides a non-normative framework for analysing how probabilistic infrastructures reorganise communicative potentiality without dissolving the distinction between communication and technology.