Rethinking the Concept of Publics in Public Relations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

publics through human perceptual states and identify them through communicative behaviour. This conceptual theory-building argues that artificial intelligence disrupts the assumed link between these two dimensions. Social bots, generative systems, and autonomous agents produce posts, comments, and amplification patterns from which publics are inferred, thereby rendering the referent of the concept less certain. The article introduces the synthetic public as a communicative formation shaped by the interaction of AI agents, automated accounts, synthetic identities, generated content, and human participation. It does not treat machines as publics; rather, it argues that AI contributes to the formation, visibility, scale, discourse, and behavioural indicators of publics. A typology of authentic, amplified, simulated, and hybrid publics is proposed, alongside as a membership, identification, representation, relationship, and formation five analytical problems. These developments challenge core assumptions of the situational theory of publics.