McLuhan Today: AI as Medium, Shaping the Global Village and Extending Human Intellect

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming media and communication, not merely as a technological tool but as an active, generative medium that shapes authorship, content, and perception. This literature review examines AI through the lens of Marshall McLuhan’s media theories, including the medium is the message, media as extensions of man, and the global village, to assess their relevance in contemporary AI-mediated communication. While McLuhan’s framework provides foundational insights, it underestimates media that exhibit agency-like qualities, such as AI systems that generate, filter, and dynamically modify content. Building on this critique, we propose a conceptualization of AI as an active medium, functioning as a co-creator, a cognitive environment, and an autonomous participant in meaning-making. The review explores the implications of generative AI tools, algorithmic curation, and real-time personalization, highlighting both opportunities for extended human cognition and creativity and challenges related to bias, misinformation, and ethical accountability. In addition, this medium reflects AI within the debate on contemporary scholars on morality and data colonialism, and emphasizes the requirement for the updated theoretical structure responsible for the unique abilities of AI. This study contributes to media and communication research by integrating the basic ideas of McLuhan with the developed role of AI, and offers an important perspective that informs future empirical research, moral ideas and the development of AI as a socially responsible medium.