Wang, W., & Downey, J. (2025). Mapping the sociotechnical imaginaries of generative AI in UK, US, Chinese and Indian newspapers. Public Understanding of Science, 34, 930–948. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625251328518
Summary
This article examines how generative AI is represented in newspaper coverage across four national contexts — the UK, US, China, and India — with a focus on the utopian and dystopian visions animating public discourse. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and Cave and Dihal’s typology of AI hopes and fears, the authors develop a quantitative content-analytic method to map these competing narratives comparatively. The central argument is that public discourse on generative AI oscillates between technologically deterministic hopes and fears, and that the prevalence and framing of these tropes vary systematically across national press systems in ways that reflect each country’s distinct political, economic, and cultural stakes in AI development.
Key Contributions
- Provides a comparative empirical mapping of generative AI imaginaries across four major media systems.
- Operationalises Cave and Dihal’s largely qualitative framework of AI hopes and fears into a quantitative method for media analysis.
- Extends sociotechnical imaginaries research to the specific case of generative AI in news discourse.
- Offers insights into how national contexts shape public narratives about emerging AI technologies.
Methods
The study is grounded conceptually in the sociotechnical imaginaries literature and Cave and Dihal’s utopian/dystopian AI typology. From this foundation the authors build a quantitative content-analytic methodology to identify and count recurring narrative tropes in newspaper coverage, then apply it in a cross-national comparative design spanning UK, US, Chinese, and Indian press outlets.
Findings
- Coverage across all four presses is structured by recurring utopian and dystopian tropes.
- There are notable cross-national differences in the prevalence and framing of particular hopes and fears about generative AI.
- Media imaginaries reflect and reinforce nationally specific political and economic stakes around AI development.
Connections
This paper sits within a growing body of work treating generative AI as an object of collective imagination and discourse rather than only a technical artefact, resonating with Hepp2026-oi and Manovich2026-ih as complementary explorations of how generative AI is culturally and socially framed. Its distinctive angle is the cross-national comparative and empirically quantitative mapping of press imaginaries.