Ghost Framing Theory: Exploring the role of generative AI in new venture rhetorical legitimation
This addresses the largely invisible use of generative AI in entrepreneurial framing, offering a novel theoretical framework for researchers in cultural entrepreneurship and human-AI collaboration.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding how generative AI influences the rhetorical legitimation of new ventures by proposing Ghost Framing Theory, which explains how founder-investor-AI ensembles co-produce and recalibrate resonance through a recursive process model.
Responding to the surging but largely invisible use of generative AI in entrepreneurial framing, I advance Ghost Framing Theory (GFT) to explain how hybrid founder- and investor-genAI ensembles co-produce, contest, and recalibrate resonance in the rhetorical legitimation of new ventures. Building on scholarship in framing, micro-level legitimacy judgments, and sociomaterial affordances, I identify genAI rhetorical affordances (generativeness, extreme combinatorics, tone repertoire, velocity/energy and shared substratum) and theorize a recursive/iterative process model (ghost pitching, ghost screening, ghost relationship-building), configuring emergent resonance and legitimation. GFT builds new rhetorical framing theory for the age of genAI, connects research on human-AI collaboration with cultural entrepreneurship and extends affordance theory into multi-actor scenarios where affordance transitivity and visibility emerge as key considerations.