Aug 2026· The International Journal of Press/Politics· 0 citations· 26 references
TL;DR
Within EU governing body texts, the same discursive patterns that map agency and erase the middle ground of debate in AI are found, helping to marginalise alternative perspectives from other stakeholders and prevent nuanced understandings of potential harms.
Abstract
Public debate around AI has been characterised by hegemonic narratives that delineate the scope of the conversation, suppressing different voices and limiting nuanced discussion of the technology’s harms and benefits. Scholars have identified technological or enchanted determinism, the arms race mentality and the utopia versus dystopia debate as key narratives around AI. These ideas saturate the conversation, driven primarily by the tech industry, which positions itself as the (only) expert voice. The industry’s capacity to drive these narratives is facilitated by its established institutional authority and dominant presence in public discourse, as well as the knowledge asymmetry inherent in the proprietary, ‘black-box’ nature of AI systems. Tech firms leverage the technical opacity of AI and their powerful societal position to define the contours of public debate, assigning agency to AI itself and the tech industry; constructing users and civil society as passive observers or recipients; and establishing a frame for debate that focuses on extreme consequences or hyperbolic benefits. This study, conducted early in 2024, investigates the effects of this interpretive frame on the policy choices and communications of the EU AI Act, through a mixed-methods computational and critical discourse analysis. Within EU governing body texts, the same discursive patterns that map agency and erase the middle ground of debate in AI are found, helping to marginalise alternative perspectives from other stakeholders and prevent nuanced understandings of potential harms. In the context of the Act itself, these patterns reverberate in the assignment of agentic roles and the scope of the regulation.
AI is increasingly embedded in government, yet its meanings and implications remain contested and often misunderstood. Science fiction is an important yet underexplored source shaping public understandings of AI by generating collective imaginaries through polarized narratives. This paper introduces a typology structured along three axes: scale of governance (micro, meso, macro), type of AI (robotic, conversational, algorithmic), and narrative role (helper, subject, opponent). We apply the typology to 76 films and 68 reflective essays from university students. Findings reveal an overrepresentation of conversational, antagonistic AI at micro and meso scales in fiction whereas participants overrepresent algorithmic AI at the macro scale. The findings reveal convergences and divergences that expose forms of sociotechnical blindness in how AI in government is imagined. The study contributes to research by offering a theoretical lens to analyse fictional AI narratives, comparing representations and perceptions, and introducing cultural artefacts to study AI in government.
Lisa Dewulf, Anthony Simonofski, N. B. Rosselló et al.· EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2026· 0 citations
A coalescent ethics of AI design is developed by bringing three converging bodies of scholarship into productive dialogue: the coalescent agency framework’s functional criteria for preserving human agency in human-AI systems; the enactive artificial intelligence model’s intersectional and gender-inclusive design prescriptions; and recent empirical findings on how Gen Z users in China construct gendered meanings in their interactions with generative AI.
Using the dispute between the U.S. Department of Defense and Anthropic, alongside backlash against OpenAI, I trace the militarized lineages of frontier AI labs and their relevance for qualitative ethics. Public discourse cast these disputes as moral contests between responsible and irresponsible firms, inviting qualitative researchers to express ethics through vendor choice. I argue that this framing functions as machinewashing, personalizing accountability while obscuring the defense, cloud, and procurement infrastructures through which universities, publishers, and researchers are already entangled. Read through necropolitics, the dispute reveals how AI policies construct a protected human subject, the “American,” while leaving others exposed to violence. Current debates over whether and how to use AI do not reach this infrastructural scale. Drawing on the implicated subject, I ask what responsibility requires when inquiry depends on infrastructures shaped by war.
Lorien S. Jordan· Qualitative Inquiry· 0 citations
It is argued that social work requires a more nuanced, philosophically informed engagement with AI, one that recognises technology as neither neutral nor inevitable, but as socially shaped, value-laden, and co-constitutive of practice.
This commentary argues that the conditions for sociological analysis of AI technologies have changed. Previously, sociologists understood AI and “intelligence” as bounded systems and, as a consequence, the key question was how machines might mimic human judgment. Today, there is a different problem as AI infrastructures are now widely diffused, aligned with concentrated private ownership and state procurement. This development was antipicated and advocated by a central text for techno-libertarians but one that is little known within sociological circles: James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual (1997). This commentary returns to the core arguments of this text to consider what sociology can be “after AI”; in a world in which AI is now embedded in infrastructural frameworks that envelop the very institutions from which sociological critique can be launched.
Nicholas Gane, Roger Burrows· Sociologica· 1 citation
