Agency, artificial intelligence, and the non-anthropocentric turn in public relations

This paper argues that the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI (GenAI), necessitates a fundamental reorientation of public relations (PR) scholarship beyond its anthropocentric foundational assumptions. Traditionally, anthropocentrism positions agency as an exclusively human capacity and clings to the inherited dualisms of ‘modern’ thinking. Yet more-than-human entities, including GenAI actors, become active agents, co-constituting a world where nature, humans, and technologies are deeply entangled. They always were, but now this entanglement is increasingly difficult to ignore. We propose that scholars engage with a non-anthropocentric (post-human) turn in PR. One way, which we adopt, of beginning this reflection is by synthesising Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the notion of symbiotic agency to (re)conceptualise agency as a relational, hybrid process that emerges through interactions among human (e.g., PR practitioners) and more-than-human actors (e.g. GenAI). This approach advances a refreshed, dynamic understanding of PR enacted by a variety of actors, disrupting the human-technology dichotomy and recognising AI as an active participant in a shared network or ecology. It also extends power in PR as post-hegemonic, arising from material interactions rather than solely representational discourse.