2026/01/01 by Tabea Lüders, Nikolai Promies, Melanie Leidecker-Sandmann +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Medicine · #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
paper · doi:10.5771/2192-4007-2026-2-006
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/16
The public AI discourse is shaped by visions and interpretations that influence how this emerging technology is perceived, assessed, developed and applied in society. Generating acceptance for a particular vision has thus become a central objective for various societal actors engaging with the new technology. Recently, (tech) entrepreneurs appear to have been more successful than others in advancing their visions of AI. Assuming a powerful journalism in selecting actors and presenting their statements to the public, several scholars attribute this disproportionate influence to an economically biased media coverage of AI. We propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes actors according to their AI-related expertise and apply it in a semi-automated content analysis of the media coverage of text-generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in German print media. Within the articles published between November 2022 and April 2024 in ten newspapers, scientists and entrepreneurs were the most frequently represented groups. Business-related practical expertise regarding AI development dominated the debate compared to science-related epistemic knowledge about the technology’s functionality or its professional impact assessment. Our findings nuance the presumed dominance of economic actors in the mediated AI discourse by revealing a nearly balanced appearance of scientists and entrepreneurs. The results point to a shortage of independent evaluations of the technology’s functionality in the form of epistemic expertise.