The Great Wall of the Press: Layered Boundary Work of AI-Integrated Journalism

Infrastructures of listening: AI and the reconfiguration of community-centered newswork

This study examines how AI-supported tools can reshape journalistic epistemologies, labor practices, and community relationships through an in-depth qualitative analysis of “Listening Across Divides,” a collaborative project conducted by NPR in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. election. Drawing on interviews with journalists, editors, and project staff across nine public media stations, the study explores how AI-mediated systems designed to record, organize, and surface themes from facilitated community conversations intersected with engagement-oriented journalism practices. Findings show that AI functioned less as a tool for automation than as an infrastructural layer supporting collective listening and cross-newsroom sense-making. The study demonstrates how technologies associated with efficiency and scale may simultaneously support and reshape slower forms of community-centered journalism rooted in sustained listening. In doing so, the article contributes to scholarship on engagement journalism, AI in newswork, and journalistic knowledge production by conceptualizing AI as a sociotechnical infrastructure for mediated collective sense-making.

AI Criticism as Contestation of Sociotechnical Imaginaries: Patterns and Limits

As so-called artificial intelligence diffuses throughout society, a growing body of critical texts contests its dominant sociotechnical imaginaries. To understand how these critiques are organized, this paper reconstructs the internal grammar of a corpus of 252 English-language critical texts. Each text is assigned a node, the domain its critique is rooted in (society, capital, technology, or the nation-state), and a critique mode, the strategy it argues through (immanent, reframing, or structural). What each mode can and cannot contest is then examined. Across the four nodes, these texts contest the dominant AI imaginary as a self-justifying financial trajectory (capital), an autonomous cognitive trajectory (technology), an irreversible social force (society), and a governable geopolitical technology (state). The findings also indicate strong correlations across the texts examined here. Capital-focused texts lean overwhelmingly toward structural critique, technology-focused texts tend toward immanent critique, state-focused texts favor reframing, and society-focused texts split between reframing and structural approaches. The analysis points toward an asymmetry, indicating that the deeper the challenge to the imaginary's conditions, the less it registers within the vocabulary the imaginary itself recognizes as valid. State institutions sustain this asymmetry by keeping structural claims out of policy, and market culture by recasting them as matters of preference.

When social work meets AI: a philosophical look at adoption, context, and critical resistance

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.

AI as the “final frontier”? Narratives, geographies, and relationships in the human–algorithm coproduction

This article critically interrogates the metaphor of artificial intelligence (AI) as a “final frontier,” revealing its colonial and expansionist roots and its inadequacy in capturing the embeddedness of AI systems within complex sociotechnical landscapes. Combining a geographical perspective with insights from computer engineering, we argue that the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act marks a paradigmatic shift from narratives of conquest to frameworks grounded in regulation, accountability, and coproduction. Through empirical vignettes in healthcare, recruitment, and criminal justice, we show how AI operates not in neutral or uncharted spaces, but within spatially and institutionally situated environments. Algorithmic systems both shape and are shaped by territorial infrastructures, legal frameworks, and social relations. By bridging disciplinary approaches, the paper advances a nuanced, interdisciplinary understanding of human–algorithm interaction – one that moves beyond deterministic imaginaries to address the spatial, political, and ethical dimensions of AI governance.

Journalism and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 21ST Century: End of an Era?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming contemporary journalism through automated news production and distribution, data analysis, and new forms of interaction between journalists and sources beyond the newsroom. However, the adoption and implications of AI in Nigerian journalism remain insufficiently understood. This study explores the impact of AI on newsrooms and examines how AI technologies can be more effectively integrated into journalistic practice. Anchored in technological determinism theory and diffusion of innovations theory, the study employed a mixed-methods approach. The findings indicate that Nigerian journalists have yet to adopt AI extensively because of unreliable electricity, limited financial resources for acquiring and maintaining AI technologies, high internet connectivity costs, and inadequate training for AI users. The study also identifies several professional and ethical concerns, including diminished journalistic creativity, insufficient human oversight, algorithmic bias, limited transparency, inadequate fact-checking, and potential threats to fairness. Despite these challenges, AI does not constitute a serious threat to professional journalism; instead, it continues to add value to journalistic practice in the digital age. The study concludes that journalists, particularly those in developing countries such as Nigeria, must adapt to technological change while maintaining appropriate professional and ethical safeguards. These findings contribute to understanding AI adoption in developing-country newsrooms and underscore the need for investment in infrastructure, capacity development, human oversight, and responsible AI governance.

Epistemic interventions An ethnographic enquiry into AI knowledge practices in the media sector