Abstract
The stories told about artificial intelligence (AI) play a central role in shaping public understanding, policy debates, and expectations about technological change. News media are especially influential in this process. Using a cross-regional corpus of 12,924 English-language news articles about AI published since 2022, we examine how storytelling about AI varies across media systems in four regions: North America, China, India, and the Middle East. Leveraging large language models, we extract the implicit narrative lessons conveyed by each article---commonly known as story morals---capturing value-laden interpretations that extend beyond thematic content or sentiment. We find that North American AI coverage is uniquely characterized by narratives of caution, while under-emphasizing narratives of innovation and collaboration that are more prevalent elsewhere. However, this pattern is largely explained by a broader regional negativity bias in North American news sentiment, rather than by heightened concern about AI itself. Our findings bring into view the culturally conditioned nature of AI news narratives.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18573
