Sensemaking as Artifact: Accumulated Influence in AI-Mediated Information Environments

Abstract

Generative AI is changing what can happen after a source artifact reaches its audience. A viewer's interpretation can now be externalized into a derivative artifact, allowing private sensemaking to become part of subsequent communication. Once such a derivative artifact circulates, it can enter subsequent viewers' information environments and shape the conditions under which their later sensemaking occurs. In this paper, we examine how this shift changes visual information communication. We first consider the viewer's immediate interaction with a source artifact and generative AI. We then examine what becomes consequential when the viewer's sensemaking takes communicative form, including communicative commitment, the legibility of transformations and source relationships, and the literacy required to interpret already-mediated information. Finally, we broaden the unit of analysis to consider how repeated and distributed AI mediation may accumulate over time, shaping what subsequent viewers notice, consider plausible, trust, and carry into subsequent sensemaking. We argue that understanding these longer-term forms of influence is a research direction for AI-mediated visual communication.