AI-Media Strategies (AIMS) Lab
The AI-Media Strategies Lab – AIMS Lab – focuses on the use of AI technologies in media industries, providing evidence-based recommendations to organizations, and producing research leveraging methods such as surveys, focus groups, experiments, and data analysis.
AIMS seeks to partner with and advise organizations on using AI tools to accomplish their media-related goals, in areas such as news, communications, social media, public relations, advocacy, and more. The Lab seeks to learn from external organizations and consolidate knowledge about the state of the art (applied research), as well as produce more basic research about AI technologies and their uses and perceptions in society relating to media and communications.
The Lab’s Director is Dr. John Wihbey, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University and a consultant and analyst. His graduate-level course “AI in Media Industries” will run in Spring 2025.
AIMS looks to be an educational bridge as the media and communications workforce adapts to a new technological paradigm.
The research goals of the AIMS Lab are:
- Identify workflows and key use cases within media and communications organizations that can benefit from the careful, structured use of generative AI technologies.
- Explore the uses of generative AI on social platforms, in order to anticipate emerging platform governance and ethics questions.
- Examine how news media organizations and journalists may deploy AI in workflows and establish corresponding governance practices.
- Leverage ongoing surveys to assess how people understand AI in media and their value preferences.
- Educate media and communications workers in new areas of competency such as prompt engineering and AI-powered workflows.
Research Assistants:
Caleb Okereke, Doctoral Program, College of Arts, Media & Design
Yash Phalle, M.S. in Artificial Intelligence Program, Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Contact the Lab director
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John P. WihbeyAssociate Professor, Director of AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMS)
[email protected]John P. Wihbey is an associate professor of media innovation and technology in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University.
JRNL 6460: AI in Media Industries
In spring 2025, Prof. Wihbey and his students are participating in a new graduate seminar, “AI in Media Industries” (JRNL 6460). A parallel undergraduate course will be offered in fall 2025.
Through Northeastern’s Service-Learning program, the course is partnering with a variety of local NGOs to help prototype AI-related media and communications workflows and applications. Students serve as AI-media advisors to clients interested in exploring new tools and products. The course also hosts guest lecturers from relevant industries.
Areas of broader focus in the course include use cases in public relations, strategic communications, social media management, and news investigative reporting. The course integrates ethics discussions throughout the module sequence, focusing on various topics in the emerging field of responsible AI.
For more, see selected course topics and associated slides:
Selected research
- “The Origin of Public Concerns over AI Supercharging Misinformation in the 2024 US Presidential Election,” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2025
- “The Algorithmic Knowledge Gap within and between Countries: Implications for Combatting Misinformation,” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2024
- “AI and Epistemic Risk for Democracy: A Coming Crisis of Public Knowledge?” Trinity College Conference on Democracy’s Mega Challenges, 2024
- “Social Media’s New Referees?: Public Attitudes Toward AI Content Moderation Bots Across Three Countries,” Ethics Institute Working Paper, Northeastern University, 2024
- “How Americans See AI: Caution, Skepticism, and Hope,” Northeastern University AI Literacy Lab, 2023
- “Marketplace of Ideas 3.0?: A Framework for the Era of Algorithms,” Richmond Journal of Law & Technology, 2023
- “Social Media Regulation, Third-Person Effect, and Public Views: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Mexico,” New Media & Society, 2022
- “The Emerging Science of Content Labeling: Contextualizing Social Media Content Moderation,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2022
- “Informational Quality Labeling on Social Media: In Defense of a Social Epistemology Strategy,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology, September 2021
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