Coordinated online manipulation in the era of generative AI: emerging challenges

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly transforming the communicative processes through which coordinated online manipulation is produced, personalized, and coordinated at unprecedented scale, raising growing concerns about its societal implications. This Mini Review critically examines empirical research published during the first 3 years of widespread public accessibility of GenAI to assess how these developments are reshaping Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) across different societal domains. Three interconnected developments consistently emerge: the transformation of communicative production through scalable, personalized, and multimodal content generation; increasing AI-assisted coordination of influence campaigns; and new forms of communicative vulnerability associated with increasingly human-like synthetic communication. Together, these developments suggest that coordinated influence is becoming more adaptive, persistent, and difficult to recognize within evolving human–AI communicative configurations. Beyond synthesizing recent empirical evidence, the review identifies emerging conceptual and methodological challenges concerning communicative agency, coordination, and authenticity, while outlining future directions for sociological research. Overall, the growing use of GenAI in evolving CIB poses significant risks to public trust, opinion formation, and democratic discourse, underscoring the urgency of understanding and addressing this rapidly evolving phenomenon.