March 18, 2024
Fevziye Ahmed Khan
<aside> 🔖 Discover how media representation shapes the view on AI and how this impacts public's interpretation of this transformational technology.
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Artificial Intelligence has grown from a mere concept in the realm of science fiction into a driving technological force today. With the increasing integration of AI in everything from healthcare to finance, it's hard to ignore its presence. Yet, the media plays a critical role in molding how we perceive this powerful technology. Sensational headlines, dramatic portrayals, and confused narratives from media tend to blur the line between fiction and reality for the public.
This article examines the media's interpretation of AI and discusses how their portrayal shapes public understanding and, many a time, creates a gap between the potentiality of AI and its actual limitations.
The most visible problem with media reporting on AI is the so-called "hype cycle." When any new technology, and one in particular as radical as AI, is first announced, media coverage tends to develop a storyline around the capability that inflates it beyond all recognition. The result is nearly always unrealistic expectations on the part of consumers, and businesses.
(Business Standard, 2023)
In 2017, headlines touted AI as the solution to nearly every major issue: from eradicating diseases to changing education as one knew it. While the potential of AI in these areas is huge, the technology is far from realizing these ambitious goals. The media often jumps on the latest bandwagon, touting what AI can potentially do without large, with challenges and limitations still remaining.
For instance, AI chatbots like OpenAI’s GPT have been lauded as groundbreaking, but the media's portrayal of these systems often neglects their current inability to fully understand context or generate nuanced responses. Such sensationalized portrayals create a false image of AI as being more advanced than it truly is, leading to confusion about what the technology can and cannot do.
In this context, entertainment media-especially science fiction-has certainly served to feed these perceptions. Films such as The Terminator and Ex Machina lead the public into beliefs that AI will become sentient beings capable of well outsmarting the human mind and may even threaten humanity. These are great stories for movie thrillers, but they are nowhere near real-world AI capabilities. Constantly playing these fictions against reality feeds public anxiety and misunderstanding about AI.
Whereas the media often presents world-changing abilities of AI in almost magical proportions, reality is far more complex. In reality, while AI has made great strides in a variety of real-world applications, it is far from the all-knowing, autonomous force that the media makes it out to be.
Currently, AI is implemented to achieve perfection in logistics, customer services, prediction analytics, and medical diagnosis, among many other fields. All such systems, however, remain based on algorithms that typically require substantive human input and supervision. The idea of AI working on its own, much less independently sans human oversight, remains a pipe dream.
Moreover, ethics form the core of the AI discussion: data privacy, algorithmic bias, and job displacement are often touted but rarely elaborated on in media portrayals. The narrative that AI will replace jobs is further sensationalized by accounts of automation taking factory and other manual labor jobs. However, many of these fears fail to balance the possibility of AI creating new jobs as well as the human-AI collaboration that will be required for many sectors.
The media’s tendency to focus on sensational applications, such as autonomous weapons or AI-powered surveillance, further skews public understanding, presenting AI as either a utopian solution or a dystopian nightmare. These one-sided portrayals undermine the nuanced discussions needed around AI’s potential and risks.
The way the media portrays artificial intelligence deeply affects the general perception of it. News, documentaries, and social media come into play in deciding opinions and influencing policy. When media outlets report on AI being used for surveillance or facial recognition, for example, this is often done within the lens of privacy concerns, without enough context over benefits such as improved security and response times in an emergency.
Such stories feed into public fear and misunderstanding of AI. To most people, AI is viewed suspiciously or skeptically, since its impact upon ordinary life is not clearly recognized or estimated. In consequence, this may be reflected in a lack of support for initiatives related to AI or slow adoption in industries that may actually benefit from such innovations.
