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Short abstract:

We empirically analyse how ‘AI’ is operationalised in German news and identify a strong disconnect between a future-oriented and promissory discourse and a nuanced contextual discourse. Based on this empirical starting point, we discuss how larger pro-innovation discourses shape the German AI hype.

Long abstract:

As a technical phenomenon that has generated over 7,500 articles in four years of German news reporting, the topic of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ certainly seems to qualify as ‘hype’. Yet, what the signifiers of both AI and hype exactly point to is a contentious and ongoing debate (Intemann 2022; Suchman 2023). In this paper, we qualitatively explore what kind of discursive object(s) ‘AI’ emerges as in German media reporting, thus offering an empirical starting point for conceptual debates around hype.

With our national focus, we contribute to a small body of research on AI in the German news, so far dominated by quantitative studies. Our approach allows us to assess how specifics of the German context, for instance the prevalence of engineering-based industries, influence, and shape AI discourses, thus studying hype as a context-specific phenomenon.

We conducted a discourse analysis examining how leading German newspapers discuss AI over four years, focusing on how articles construct AI and imbue it with meaning. Our analysis identifies two interrelated but distinct discourses around AI, situated on a continuum between future-oriented and promissory generalisation and nuanced, use-case specific particularity. We refer to them as discourses of AI-in-general and AI-in-particular (Michael 1992).

Our empirically grounded conceptual work speaks to the topic of this panel as it allows us to trace how ‘hype’ on AI emerges in specific contexts. It can thus serve as an invitation for joint reflections between STS scholars and AI practitioners on what it may mean to communicate responsibly in a hyped environment.