Stanusch, N., & Rogers, R. (2026). How AI is imagined by industry during the Sam Altman controversy. New Media Soc.. https://doi.org/10.31124/advance.174979411.18178682/v1
Summary
This paper treats the November 2023 firing and rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a controversy that surfaces how the AI industry imagines, narrates, and contains AI as a public issue. Through cross-platform digital methods on LinkedIn and X/Twitter, Stanusch and Rogers map three dominant industry-aligned imaginaries — Longtermism, Regulatory Ambivalence, and Techno-Hagiography — and argue that the industry deploys two complementary tactics, premediation (externalizing concerns into a speculative future) and preclusion (internalizing critique by positioning itself as the only competent problem-solver). The result is a near-monopolization of AI’s future framing, partially contested by counter-imaginaries on X/Twitter that re-center governance, intersectional harms, and the black-boxed sublime.
Key Contributions
- Recasts sociotechnical imaginaries as sites of issuefication: actively shaping which concerns become salient and which are made invisible.
- Names premediation and preclusion as concrete discursive tactics by which the AI industry absorbs and redirects controversy.
- Provides an empirical, cross-platform map of AI imaginaries during a discrete, high-visibility controversy.
- Demonstrates platform specificity: LinkedIn as an aspirational echo chamber for industry imaginaries; X/Twitter as a more contested arena hosting counter-imaginaries.
- Extends Latourian controversy mapping and digital methods to AI industry self-representation on professional/discourse platforms.
Methods
Controversy mapping in the Latourian tradition, operationalized through cross-platform digital methods. The authors scraped ~1,900 LinkedIn posts and ~1,700 X/Twitter posts (Nov 2023–Jan 2024) using the Zeeschuimer browser extension, with X/Twitter accounts compiled by Google-querying 101 AI research/safety/ethics/justice organizations and selecting three associated accounts each. Network analysis (co-hashtag and mention networks for LinkedIn; retweet networks for X/Twitter) was done in Gephi with 4CAT for filtering. A three-step inductive qualitative coding process (ethnographic content analysis → keyword/actor/issue identification → labeling of emergent imaginaries) yielded the imaginary categories. Posts were anonymized via paraphrasing.
Findings
- LinkedIn discourse was dominated by Longtermism (AGI, superalignment, existential risk), Techno-Hagiography (Altman mythologized as lone-genius hero), and Regulatory Ambivalence (acknowledging the need for regulation while resisting external oversight).
- LinkedIn also hosted heavy “LinkedIn Talk” (self-promotion, recruitment) and opportunistic crypto discourse riding the controversy.
- X/Twitter surfaced counter-imaginaries: Governing Urgency (demanding state regulation, distrusting Big Tech self-regulation) and Intersectionality (highlighting white-male dominance, racism, anti-Palestinian bias, including the Tal Broda controversy).
- A Technological Sublime imaginary emerged around copyright disputes and the unpredictability of black-boxed AI capability.
- Notably absent: AI’s environmental costs, labor effects, slow-AI alternatives, and historical comparison — present-day harms displaced by speculative future risk.
- Longtermism’s roots in early-2000s effective altruism, x-risk, and AI Safety communities help explain its current displacement of present harms.
Connections
This piece pairs naturally with Dodds2026-df and Weinbrand2026-sf as critical analyses of how AI discourse is constructed, mythologized, and strategically circulated by industry actors, and it complements Wang2025-zy in examining how AI hype operates as a structuring force. Its premediation/preclusion framework offers a useful analytic lens for the broader literature on AI hype imaginaries, particularly where future-oriented rhetoric crowds out present harms.
Podcast
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