Mapping the sociotechnical imaginaries of generative AI in UK, US, Chinese and Indian newspapers

Summary

This paper develops a comparative, quantitative mapping of how generative AI is imagined in newspaper coverage across four major media systems: the UK, US, China, and India. Drawing on the sociotechnical imaginaries tradition and Cave and Dihal’s typology of utopian and dystopian AI narratives, the authors argue that public discourse on generative AI oscillates between technologically deterministic visions of salvation and ruin, and that these visions are structured in nationally distinctive ways. By operationalising a previously qualitative framework into a content-analytic methodology, the paper offers an empirical account of how hopes and fears about generative AI are unevenly distributed across press systems shaped by different political, economic, and cultural conditions.

Key Contributions

• Empirical comparative mapping of generative AI imaginaries across four major national press systems.
• Operationalisation of Cave and Dihal’s qualitative hopes/fears typology into a quantitative content-analytic instrument.
• Extension of sociotechnical imaginaries scholarship to the specific, fast-moving case of generative AI in news discourse.
• Analytical insights into how national sociopolitical context shapes the framing of emerging AI technologies in mainstream media.

Methods

The study combines conceptual grounding in sociotechnical imaginaries and Cave and Dihal’s utopian/dystopian AI narrative framework with a quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage. Articles from the UK, US, Chinese, and Indian press are coded for recurring narrative tropes, enabling cross-national comparison of the prevalence and configuration of particular hopes and fears about generative AI.

Findings

• Coverage in all four national presses is structured by a recurring repertoire of utopian and dystopian tropes about generative AI.
• The prevalence and framing of specific hopes and fears differs systematically across the UK, US, China, and India.
• These differences track each country’s political and economic stakes in AI development, with media imaginaries reflecting and reinforcing nationally specific agendas.
• Technologically deterministic narratives — both optimistic and catastrophist — dominate over more nuanced or structural accounts.

Connections

This paper sits alongside other work probing the discursive construction of AI hype and imaginaries, including Dodds2026-df and Stanusch2026-ec, which similarly interrogate how narratives about AI’s future are produced and circulated. Its distinctive contribution to that conversation is the cross-national comparative scope and the methodological move from qualitative typology to quantitative mapping.