Contested Chinese Dreams of AI? Public discourse about Artificial intelligence on WeChat and People’s Daily Online

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a prominent public issue, particularly in China, where the government has announced plans to turn the country into a global AI power. This study analyses public discourse about AI in China through the conceptual lens of public spheres theory and counterpublic spheres. It compares the official AI narrative on People's Daily Online with public discussion about AI on the social medium WeChat, where we assumed that official views would be challenged. Using a combination of qualitative and computational methods, 140,000 AI-related articles published between 2015 and 2018 were studied. Findings reveal that AI-related discourse on WeChat is surprisingly similar to that on People's Daily Online. That is, it is dominated by industry and political actors, such as government agencies and technology companies, and is mostly characterized by discussions about the economic potential of the technology, with strongly positive evaluations, and little critical debate.

Online public discourse on artificial intelligence and ethics in China: context, content, and implications

“…WeChat’s public application programming interface (API) is notoriously difficult to access. To collect relevant posts from its public accounts, we used the proven method of web-scraping through the third-party search engine Sogou, which provides access to historical data of WeChat public accounts (You et al 2018 ; Zeng et al 2020 ). When we started our research, the search engine Sogou did not support site search for Zhihu posts, so we used another Chinese search engine, Baidu, to collect Zhihu data.…”

“…The latter are found to be done by both hired “internet commentators” or “50 cent party members” 1 and public intellectuals (King et al 2017 ; Abb 2021 ). In the case of discourse relating to AI in general, and not any specific ethical aspects, researchers have found that social media content largely conforms to the party-state media’s framing of AI’s economic benefits, with little evidence of critical debates (Zeng et al 2020 ).…”

On the use of pride, hope and fear in China’s international artificial intelligence narratives on CGTN

“…In terms of the organization and implementation of the AI strategy, the 2017 plan noted the following vis-à-vis the guiding of public opinion: "Make full use of the variety of traditional media and new media, timely publicity of new progress in AI, new results, to inform the public of healthy developments in AI" (The State Council of China 2017b,28). As a result, Zeng observed how: "Chinese state media have often highlighted positive AI stories, such as how advanced AI technology has helped thousands of families to find lost children or helped the police to catch criminals with unprecedented speed," (Zeng 2020(Zeng , 1452 and that China's communications have been met with positive evaluations in China (Zeng et al 2020).…”

Ever heard of ethical AI? Investigating the salience of ethical AI issues among the German population

“…In recent years, a considerable amount of research has focused on the analysis of news reporting on AI (Brennen, Howard, & Nielsen, 2018;Chuan, Tsai, & Cho, 2019;Fast & Horvitz, 2017;Fischer & Puschmann, 2021;Ouchchy, Coin, & Dubljević, 2020;Sun, Zhai, Shen, & Chen, 2020;Vergeer, 2020;Zeng, Chan, & Schäfer, 2020). According to the studies of Fast and Horvitz (2017), Sun et al (2020) and Chuan et al (2019) for the US, Fischer and Puschmann (2021) for the German and Vergeer (2020) for the Dutch press, media reporting about AI sharply increased in recent years, leading to a steady presence of AI in news reporting.…”