Shape or adapt? Perceived and attributed agency in the appropriation of communicative AI in journalism
PhD project of Antonia Eichenauer
New technologies like AI often get attributed agency themselves. Especially in professional contexts, humans are put in a reactive position, asked to ensure “a speady uptake” (Brown et al. 2016, 9) of these new technologies. This can be observed in regard to communicative AI when it is described as the driving force of a media change that is affecting the whole information system.
For my dissertation, I am wondering how this manifests in journalism: How do journalists perceive their agency when it comes to doing journalism in a world with AI? Building on the work of Harré and van Langehove (1999), my aim is to demonstrate, through the lens of Positioning Theory, how the relationship between journalism and communicative AI is negotiated. Positioning Theory is applicable on the micro, meso and macro level. This allows to show how journalists, journalistic communities and publishers position themselves in relation to AI companies or the technology itself.
Positionings get evident in communication. This can be interactions of journalists with communicative AI in their daily working life, but also the stories that are told about communicative AI. Preliminary results from metajournalistic discourse, interviews and group discussions, show that journalists perceive communicative AI as a helpful tool they use for their own benefit. However, some also fear they could be replaced by AI. Publishers, on the other side, emphasise to uphold journalistic core values like accuracy and position themselves as trusted news sources in contrast to hallucinating machines.
Our ethnographic field research in P5 serves as the data basis for my dissertation. I will also include our expert interviews with pioneers, group discussions with permanent and freelance journalists, and the metajournalistic discourse. My specific focus will be placed on the processes of imagining the future of journalism. I will examine the data in terms of content, but also from a critical linguistic perspective. For the latter I will conduct a metaphor analysis to explicate the underlying thought patterns.
With that I will be able to draw conclusions about how journalists perceive their own agency when it comes to shaping the future of their profession in a world with communicative AI.
Contact
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp
ZeMKI, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research
University of Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67620
Assistent Mrs. Schober: +49 421 218-67603
E-mail: andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de
