WS.5 calls for contributions that interrogate the fast-evolving relationship between generative AI and the Web, how this relationship is transforming the ways we access, produce, authenticate, preserve, govern, and value information.

Over the past three decades, the Web has been structured around a set of familiar operations and infrastructures: publishing and linking, indexing and ranking, searching and browsing, platformization and API ecosystems. Today, generative AI systems, in particular LLMs and multimodal models, are being woven into web interfaces and web back-ends alike: answer engines and conversational search, writing assistants embedded in browsers and editors, agentic tools that navigate the Web on our behalf, synthetic content at web scale, and retrieval-augmented architectures that treat the Web simultaneously as knowledge base, training corpus, and distribution channel.

This new configuration raises fundamental questions for Web Studies. If the Web is increasingly encountered through model-mediated interactions, what becomes of the Web’s usual ways of showing where information comes from: links, sources, documents, and traceability? If prompting becomes a dominant access mode, how do we understand the shift from querying to instructing, from navigating to delegating, from search literacy to prompt literacy? How do we assess authority, provenance, bias, and uncertainty when answers are synthesized, personalized, and conversational? What happens to the link ecosystem, web publishing incentives, and the visibility of smaller sites when traffic is mediated by generative summaries? How do regulation, platform governance, licensing, and dataset construction reshape what the Web is and what it can be?

WS.5 welcomes theoretical, empirical, methodological, technical, critical, and creative contributions that examine generative AI as: