Our new article „ News Media Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: A Qualitative Analysis Across China, Germany, and the United States”, co-authored with Heng Yang, Mike S. Schäfer, and Meg Jing Zeng was just published in Emerging Media: Technology, Industry and Society.

https://doi.org/10.1177/27523543241300185

In this paper, we analysed news media imaginaries of artificial intelligence (#AI) in healthcare in three countries striving for global leadership in AI: China, Germany, and the USA. AI has attracted increasing public interest over the last decade and as countries are defining their preferred pathways for the development and implementation of AI, healthcare has nearly universally emerged as a priority area.
We argue that news media are an important arena for the negotiation, construction and promotion of sociotechnical imaginaries of AI, which in turn can shape the trajectories of AI development. Therefore, we asked:
1) What imaginaries of AI in healthcare are publicly constructed in Chinese, German, and US news coverage?
2) Who gets to contribute to the construction of these imaginaries in the news?

Drawing from a thematic analysis of articles from 15 newspapers, we found two powerful, cross-national, collectively held imaginaries:

1) The first imaginary focused on ENHANCING HEALTHCARE WITH AI and emerged across all three countries.
2) The second imaginary centred on using AI TO MANAGE PANDEMICS/EPIDEMICS and was only fully developed in Chinese and US coverage, though present as an outlier in German news coverage.

We also identified lower-level divergences within imaginaries across the three countries, which we linked to systemic differences between the three countries, such as the largely private US healthcare system, the mostly state-controlled Chinese media and healthcare systems, and the German hesitancy toward emerging technologies.

You can find the open access paper here: https://doi.org/10.1177/27523543241300185

Special thanks go to my co-authors for the constructive collaboration and their crucial contributions to the paper, to the editorial team at Emerging Media: Technology, Industry and Society for their efficient handling of the manuscript, and to Shanghai Jiao Tong University for supporting the open access publishing of the article.

#imaginaries #sociotechnicalimaginaries #artificialintelligence #healthcare #newsmedia