Technohybridism: Recursive Semantic Normalization in AI-Mediated Societies

Charalampos M. Liapis, Epameinondas Panagopoulos

Language-generating AI systems are no longer only objects of linguistic interaction: their outputs increasingly re-enter the communicative and institutional practices from which their training material was drawn. Drawing on social theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of language, this article develops a sociotechnical account of that re-entry. We introduce recursive semantic normalization: the process through which machine-generated formulations, once recurrently taken up, evaluated, reused, and institutionally retained, participate in the reproduction and transformation of semantic regularities. Under the heading of technohybridism, we argue that the relevant unit of analysis is the hybrid semantic system, a recursively coupled configuration of human practices, computational generation, and institutional uptake. First, we distinguish the concept from neighbouring accounts, including model collapse, looping effects, machine habitus, machine culture, and the epistemology of AI testimony. Second, we develop an analytical model that separates generation, selection, uptake, and persistence and distinguishes machine-attributable change from change that would have occurred…