An Alien in the Newsroom: AI Anxiety in European and American Newspapers

Pablo Sanguinetti and Bella Palomo ()
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Pablo Sanguinetti: School of Communication, University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Bella Palomo: School of Communication, University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain

Social Sciences, 2024, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: The media portrayal of artificial intelligence (AI) directly impacts how audiences conceptualize this technology and, therefore, its use, development, and regulation. This study aims to measure a key aspect of this problem: the feeling of AI anxiety conveyed by news outlets that represent this technology as a sort of “alien” that is autonomous, opaque, and independent of humans. To do so, we build an AI anxiety index based on principal component analysis (PCA) and apply it to a corpus of headlines ( n = 1682) about AI published before and after the launch of ChatGPT in ten newspapers: The New York Times , The Guardian , El País, Le Monde , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , San Francisco Chronicle , Manchester Evening News , La Voz de Galicia , Ouest France , and Münchner Merkur . The results show that ChatGPT not only boosted the number of AI headlines (× 5.16) but also reduced positive sentiments (−26.46%) and increased negatives (58.84%). The AI anxiety index also grew (10.59%), albeit driven by regional media (61.41%), while it fell in national media (−6.82%). Finally, the discussion of the variables that compose the index reveals the opportunities and challenges faced by national and regional media in avoiding the feeling of AI anxiety.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; AI narratives; AI anxiety; ChatGPT; newspapers; headline analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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