**Abstract**

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalism and other communication practices brings up long-standing debates regarding the potentials of technological innovations for good and evil in society. Since the 20th century, when McLuhan argued that technologies help extend human capacity, media technologies have been regarded as liberating and empowering. Technologies aided human manipulation of mechanical and electronic processes in the media and communication industries. Arguably, social interactions were enhanced- extending audience reach, expanding scopes of coverage, altering the limitations of time and space, and bridging critical information gaps. By adding the power of computing to mechanical and electronic innovation of the past, as done with AI, far greater is the potential of media for good or ill in 21st-century society. The network societies are now better connected. Westernised societies are linked with those in the global south, individuals and media organisations alike are creating content. The resultant gluts of information further intensify the nature of global and social challenges. Given digital divide concerns being accelerated by AI, the Digital Dichotomy Theory (DD-Theory) is proposed towards understanding the inherent global media communication dynamics.

**Keywords:** artificial intelligence, dichotomy theory, digital, media and societies, machine learning
