“Artificial intelligence is still in its infancy—and that should scare us”, “Can the machines save us?”, “The Robot Artists Aren’t Coming”―these news headlines illustrate the intensive, diverse discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years. Such discussions are typical for emerging technologies, as their evolution and implementation in different realms of society is often accompanied by intensive public negotiations. In these negotiations, stakeholders from diverse fields compete for public visibility, even hegemony of themselves and their evaluations and discursive positions (Ferree et al., 2002). If successful, they influence public perceptions and support (Bolsen et al., 2022), and contribute to the construction of powerful imaginaries which shape the developmental trajectories of emerging technologies (Pentzold et al., 2020) such as AI.
AI has become the centre of public debates, raised normative questions, and inspired both strong optimism and anxiety (Brause et al., 2023). It has been claimed to transform manifold aspects of society, even though its exact definition is still being negotiated (Krafft et al., 2020). This interpretive flexibility of AI in particular leaves room for stakeholders to debate and thus shape its development and institutionalisation (Jobin & Katzenbach, 2023).
This panel examines the public negotiation of AI with an eye towards current debates, but also towards the future-oriented imaginaries embedded in those. It investigates both speakers and content of this negotiation, focuses on public communication across several arenas including news media, social media and corporate communication, and compares these negotiations across different socio-political contexts, including Germany, the United States (U.S.), and China. The first paper provides an analysis and taxonomy of AI stakeholders in public debates on social media in Germany and the U.S. The second contribution assesses one specific stakeholder’s public communication, investigating how corporate actors shape normative debates and imaginaries of AI. The third paper focuses on debates and imaginaries of AI in news media across countries. The panel concludes with a commentary interpreting and contextualising the research papers.
In sum, this panel shows that sociotechnical projects around AI do not develop in a vacuum, but are publicly negotiated across various arenas and national contexts, and are loaded with values and normative framings. As such, their development is shaped by the public communication of different stakeholders and their normative stances in the public sphere. The panel is based on a DACH project funded by DFG and SNSF involving researchers from the Universities of Bremen and Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
References
Bolsen, T., Palm, R., & Kingsland, J. T. (2022). How Negative Frames Can Undermine Public Support for Studying Solar Geoengineering in the U.S. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 10.
Brause, S. R., Zeng, J., Schäfer, M. S., & Katzenbach, C. (2023). Media Representations of Artificial Intelligence. Surveying the Field. In S. Lindgren (Ed.), Handbook in Critical Studies of AI. Edward Elgar.
Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge University Press.
Jobin, A., & Katzenbach, C. (2023). The becoming of AI: A critical perspective on the contingent formation of AI. In S. Lindgren (Ed.), Handbook of Critical Studies of AI. Edward Elgar.
Krafft, P. M., Young, M., Katell, M., Huang, K., & Bugingo, G. (2020). Defining AI in Policy versus Practice. Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 72–78.
Pentzold, C., Kaun, A., & Lohmeier, C. (2020). Imagining and instituting future media: Introduction to the special issue. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 26(4).
