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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses short online videos where AI developers, founders, and CEOs use metaphors of nature and the natural to frame AI as a threat or opportunity. Thus, digital space polarises into optimistic and pessimistic narratives, placing the burden of choice on the audience.

Paper long abstract

The presentation is based on an analysis of post-science fiction narratives used by founders, developers, and CEOs of companies developing artificial intelligence, which circulate in the form of short video (reels) on social networks such as Instagram and YouTube. Our focus is on the metaphors and allegories of nature, the natural, the human, and the social through which artificial intelligence is described in these videos. Certain narratives can be categorised, on one side, as progressive, techno-utopian messages that laud AI as the essential continuation of natural evolution, promising an improved future for humanity. Conversely, there are negative, almost fatalistic narratives that depict AI as a natural force that poses a risk of social disintegration and potentially even human extinction. Regardless of whether they take an optimistic or pessimistic position, many authors of media content use a new trope: "it's not science fiction anymore".

Through this analysis, we aim to show how metaphors related to nature, humanity, and sociality are mobilised as key resources in the articulation of these opposing visions. As in political or cultural conflicts, here too the general public is urged to take a stance in a debate shaped by technological elites. In this way, digital narratives about AI not only transform our understandings of nature but also redistribute the burden of deciding the direction of our collective future.

We approach the digital space as an ethnographic field, drawing concepts from utopian studies together with theories of metaphor as tools for explaining the post-SF world and its phenomena.