Where exactly between utopia and dystopia? A framing analysis of AI and automation in US newspapers

TLDR

Over the past six decades, media outlets have reported on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation. This study aims to provide a nuanced overview of how AI and automation are covered in U.S. newspapers. The authors applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation to New York Times and Washington Post articles from 1985–2020 and conducted an inductive manual framing analysis to identify evolving frames.

Abstract

Over the last 60 years, media outlets have been covering emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. This countrylevel study wants to give a nuanced overview of how these technologies were covered in US newspapers. First, a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling was conducted on articles on AI and automation in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 1985 and 2020. Second, an inductive manual framing analysis was conducted to distinguish the frames that both newspapers applied over time. Results from the topic modeling show that articles on AI and automation are most prominent within ‘Work’, ‘Art’, and ‘Education’. Concerning the manual framing analysis, the coverage has been more optimistic than pessimistic over time. However, when dystopian frames are considered, the results show that there has been more attention in the corpus on the impact of AI and automation on ethical conundrums involved with these technologies.