Artificial intelligence, AI, is increasingly seen as a political infrastructure with power to influence power relations. In this study, the media framing of AI in the Global South and the Global North are examined by Bárbara Maria Farias Mota from Freie Universität.
Research has been conducted on multiple domains where AI can be utilized: primary and secondary education (Baidoo-Anu & Ansah 2023; Chiu 2024), scientific discovery (Krenn et al.2022; Wang et al. 2023), and large-scale generation of targeted disinformation (Gehringer et al. 2024), among other topics like news.
This study targets the study gap: the news coverage of AI, comparing the Global North and the Global South, which has only been covered before by one study: the one by Ittefaq et al. 2024, which nevertheless did not cover the analysis of individual frames or how AI is politically framed between the regions.
For the dataset, 7291 articles were collected from LexisNexis. They were only in English and represented a wide array of perspectives. The New York Times and China Daily were the outlets with the most articles from the North and the South, respectively.
After collecting and organizing the articles, the author applied topic modelling and sentiment analysis. The analysis was both quantitative and qualitative in character. According to the findings, the relationship between artificial intelligence and politics has become the centre of public debate, and the coverage in media increased exponentially.
The most prevalent frames were ‘Social Media and Tech Impact’ (16,03%, ‘Technology and the Digital Economy’ (12.54%), China–US Relations and Trade’ (11.41%), ‘Technology Companies and Innovation’ (11.27%), ‘AI and Society’ (10.40%). There were also secondary themes like ‘Global Development and China’ (6.74%) and ‘International Conflicts and Geopolitics’ (2.77%), followed by rarer national frames.
Temporally, the author divided the coverage into phases. Phase 1, the incipient phase, was 2010-2016, and the coverage of AI and politics remained marginal. Phase 2 reflected politicisation through crisis and was 2017-2021; with Cambridge Analytica being a turning point for the realisation that AI can influence politics. Finally, phase 3 reflected exponential acceleration and regulatory adjustment in 2022-2024.
When looking at the contrast between the Global North and the Global South, the differences become pronounced. The coverage was a lot more positive in the South: in the Global North, 41.7% of the headlines registered negative sentiment versus 37.8% positive, while in the South it was 51.5% positive and only 22.7% negative.
China-US relations were a common theme, the technological “Cold War” between the nations. Corporate power was also prevalent, as many frames referenced to companies and the digital economy.
In conclusion, the media in the Global North mainly emphasized risks such as violations of privacy, while the Global South focused more on the transformative potential of artificial intelligence. However, the author cautions that the analysis only dealt with English-language media, making the analysis only partial.
The article “Weapon, wonder or both? Political framings of AI in global north and south media” by Bárbara Maria Farias Mota is in Information, Communication & Society. (Open access).
Picture: blue and brown globe on persons hand by Greg Rosenke.
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