Who dominates the discourse on ChatGPT? Experts on text-generative Artificial Intelligence in German newspapers

The public AI discourse is permeated by visions and interpretations that influence the way in which the emerging technology is perceived, evaluated, developed and applied in society. Generating acceptance for a particular vision is therefore a central goal for a variety of societal actors engaged with the new technology. Recently businesspeople like Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai or Elon Musk seem to be more successful in promoting their AI visions than others. Assuming a powerful journalism that selects actors and presents their statements publicly, various scholars explain the disproportionate influence through an economically biased media coverage of AI. To contextualise this concern, we develop a conceptual framework to differentiate actors according to their AI related expertise and examine it via a semi-automated content analysis of the media coverage of text-generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in German print media. Within the articles published between November 2022 and April 2024 in ten newspapers, scientists and businesspeople were mostly identified. Commonly business-related practical expertise regarding AI development dominated the debate compared to rather science-related epistemic knowledge about the technology’s functionality or its professional ethical evaluation. In summary, our findings put into perspective the assumed dominance of economic actors in the mediated AI debate by extrapolating a nearly balanced appearance of scientists and businesspeople but indicating a shortage of independent evaluations of the technology’s functionality in the form of epistemic expertise.