• Being a doctoral researcher at the Research Unit

Communicative Construction of Alternative AI Futures at Algorithm Watch and Mozilla Foundation

PhD project of Phillip Engelhardt

The discourse surrounding the future of AI is currently dominated by commercial systems, profitable use cases, and promises of economic growth driven by Big Tech.  

Various actors from the non-profit sector view this dominance of commercial AI as a danger to the public: systems like ChatGPT or Grok are criticized for their at times problematic response behavior, while companies such as OpenAI, xAI or Palantir are accused of collaborating with authoritarian regimes and subverting democratic institutions and infrastructures.  

The regulation of Big Tech through (inter-)national legislation cannot keep pace with the speed and dynamism of AI developments. As an alternative to the centralization of AI development in the commercial sector, the non-profit sector has begun to imagine a Public AI: a freely accessible, open-source AI infrastructure designed to support public administration and preserve deliberative-democratic processes. Beyond its commercialization, AI offers diverse potentials for the positive transformation of society in the public interest. Public AI seeks to identify and unlock these potentials.  

The aim of my dissertation is to develop a comprehensive understanding of Public AI as a future-oriented vision of artificial intelligence. The central research question of my thesis is how Public AI is communicatively constructed. In doing so, I analyze three sub-aspects: (1) the constellation of actors surrounding Public AI, (2) the communicative practices of this actor constellation, and (3) the conceptions of AI as a public good. Methodologically, I work with qualitative coding of interviews, publication materials and key texts, event ethnographies, and a discourse analysis of an online forum.  

The dissertation contributes to communication and media studies research by examining an emergent AI future vision that is imagined as a third way — alongside national or sovereign AI on the one hand and commercial AI on the other — to enable the society of the future through AI.

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• Phillip Engelhardt