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New Publication Explores Global AI Imaginaries

How is the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) envisioned – and who shapes these visions? A new article published in the Journal of Science Communication investigates this question, co-authored by Prof. Dr. Christian Katzenbach, principal investigator of ComAI’s “Governance” project.

The study examines how key societal stakeholders – including actors from politics, industry, academia, media, and civil society – negotiate diverse and often conflicting imaginaries of AI in the U.S., China, and Germany. These imaginaries are not only culturally rooted but politically contested, and they play a crucial role in how AI is publicly discussed, governed, and implemented.

Challenging the notion of monolithic national perspectives, the comparative analysis highlights how shared global narratives, such as the “AI race,” take very different forms in each country – shaped by local discourses, institutions, and power dynamics. For example, while the EU emphasizes regulation and digital sovereignty, U.S. stakeholders often invoke innovation-driven competition, and in China, state-driven imaginaries dominate.

This publication directly contributes to the research aims of the ComAI consortium by showing how AI is discursively constructed as a sociotechnical phenomenon – and how governance is negotiated through competing visions of the future.

Read the article: Richter, V., Katzenbach, C. & Zeng, J. (2025). Negotiating AI(s) futures: Competing imaginaries of AI by stakeholders in the U.S., China, and Germany. JCOM 24(02), A08. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.24020208

The empirical study was carried out as part of the “Imaginaries of AI” project (funded by the DFG and SNF, 450649594), which represents important preliminary work for the ComAI research group.