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Paper short abstract

This study examines how the roles of AI technologies are constructed in EU discourse through a narrative lens. More specifically, we aim to analyse the various roles attributed to AI technologies at the EU level and understand whether these can be mapped to “strong” and “weak” AI narratives.

Paper long abstract

This study examines how the roles of AI technologies are constructed in EU discourse through a narrative lens. More specifically, we aim to analyse the various roles attributed to AI technologies at the EU level and understand whether these can be mapped to “strong” and “weak” AI narratives. We borrow the conceptual distinction described by Bory et al. (2025), which differentiates between (super)humanlike (strong) aspirations for AI and narrower, system-/function-focused (weak) accounts. Using methods from computational narrative understanding with a focus on narrative roles, we assemble and investigate a collection of EU policy documents and debates from the past decade – the exact sampling approach and span is tbd, currently resources like the EUR-Lex, OECD AI Policy Observatory, Global News Dataset, or NewsAPI are candidates for data collection. The investigation will involve a quantitative study, supplemented with human validation, and an accompanying qualitative analysis conducted on a subset of our data. Our analysis will build on recent approaches to operationalising character roles in public discourse — e.g., using Greimas’ actantial model (Elfes, 2025) or taxonomy-free labelling (Hobson et al., 2025). In doing so, we aim to identify common tropes underpinning the characterisation, development, and implementation of AI technologies in the EU context and offer a methodological contribution for this line of research.

This proposal is a work-in-progress; during the Coding the State panel we would discuss our preliminary results.