AI Narrative Breakdown. A Critical Assessment of Power and Promise

2025-06-23

Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency

AI Summary

This study addresses how dominant AI narratives often obscure the underlying political dimensions, power structures, and value-laden assumptions embedded in artificial intelligence, leading to misjudgments of its societal impacts and gaps in governance. Focusing on the discourse surrounding ChatGPT’s release, the project draws on an interdisciplinary synthesis of critical computer science, Science and Technology Studies (STS), data protection theory, semiotics, and philosophy of mind to systematically deconstruct the prevailing utopian/dystopian binary. It introduces the concept of “Zeitgeist AI” to uncover the implicit power relations and normative choices shaping AI development, emphasizing AI’s nature as a human-directed tool requiring robust social regulation. The work ultimately advocates for a more grounded, responsible AI discourse and governance framework attuned to these socio-technical complexities.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Artificial General Intelligence
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

This article sets off for an exploration of the still evolving discourse surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in the wake of the release of ChatGPT. It scrutinizes the pervasive narratives that are shaping the societal engagement with AI, spotlighting key themes such as agency and decision-making, autonomy, truthfulness, knowledge processing, prediction, general purpose, neutrality and objectivity, apolitical optimization, sustainability game-changer, democratization, mass unemployment, and the dualistic portrayal of AI as either a harbinger of societal utopia or dystopia. Those narratives are analysed critically based on insights from critical computer science, critical data and algorithm studies, from STS, data protection theory, as well as from the philosophy of mind and semiotics. To properly analyse the narratives presented, the article first delves into a historical and technical contextualisation of the AI discourse itself. The article then introduces the notion of "Zeitgeist AI" to critique the imprecise and misleading application of the term "AI" across various societal sectors. Then, by discussing common narratives with nuance, the article contextualises and challenges often assumed socio-political implications of AI, uncovering in detail and with examples the inherent political, power infused and value-laden decisions within all AI applications. Concluding with a call for a more grounded engagement with AI, the article carves out acute problems ignored by the narratives discussed and proposes new narratives recognizing AI as a human-directed tool necessarily subject to societal governance.

Problem

• AI narratives
• power
• societal governance
• value-laden technology
• Zeitgeist AI

Innovation

• Zeitgeist AI
• critical AI studies
• sociotechnical narratives
• algorithmic power
• AI governance