The News Framing of Artificial Intelligence

Description

News reporting on artificial intelligence (A.I.) and big data plays an important role in shaping public perception of technological trends. Media narratives about technology can create awareness for the profound transformative effects of novel technologies and the social, economic, and political stakes involved. This concerns critical questions about the definition of values, benefits, and risks associated with data-driven technologies. Analysing how news media portray A.I. reveals what interpretative frameworks circulate in public discourses and who “gets to speak” about datafication and automation. This, in turn, allows for tracing relationships of power in tech discourses.

To this end, the present study charts A.I. media frames in five internationally renowned news outlets with a focus on technology: The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, Washington Post, and Gizmodo. The main goal is to identify 1) dominant emphasis frames in A.I. news reporting over the past decade, 2) benefits and risks associated with A.I., and 3) organisations and experts who frequently contribute to A.I. media discourses. An automated content analysis served for inductive frame detection (N=4130), charting risk references, while a network analysis revealed frequent social entities in the news texts (via Named Entity Recognition). The results show how A.I.’s ubiquity emerged rapidly in the mid-2010s and that the news discourse became more critical as well as political over time. Furthermore, a relatively static spectrum of economic, political, and media elites dominate A.I. discourses, although there are indicators for a tentative increase of diversity in recent years. Nevertheless, news outlets could provide social groups affected by A.I. as well as actors from civil society with more visibility. Finally, it is argued that A.I. news reporting forms an important part in building critical data literacy among lay audiences by making tech discourses more transparent.

Period	23 Jun 2022
Event title	Data Power: Dialogues in Data Power
Event type	Conference
Location	Bremen, GermanyShow on map