Team Canada
Is AI a tsunami, a fourth industrial revolution, or a looming dystopia? Since 2012, a wide array of media experts and professionals have shaped popular discourse about, and lay understandings on, what AI is, what it currently does, what it could eventually accomplish and whether journalist speculation about AI has been as influential to AI’s success as the technology itself. Through inductive and deductive mixed methods, research investigates how journalists simplify competing technical and policy realities in the name of public interest, give certain actors more visibility and legitimacy than others, and invoke particular publics when stabilizing realities of 21st-century AI. We seek to understand both how the media has shaped national and international understandings of AI as well as understand the influence of the press in a high-choice and saturated media environment where the latest news report becomes just another status update in the daily feed.