The Language of the European Union on Artificial intelligence: A distant reading of the rhetoric on Artificial Intelligence in the European Union’s online publications

Abstract

In light of the recently published Artificial Intelligence strategy for Europe and the European Union’s claim of focusing on innovation and legal and ethical frameworks, this study examined the rhetoric of the European government on Artificial intelligence in 361 of their online publications that available on EUR-Lex (from the timeframe of 1977 to 2018). By drawing from an approach grounded in the Digital Humanities and literary history studies, this study employed distant reading through quantification and text mining of the corpus with the software tool AntConc. This explorative approach was selected for its ability to examine patterns, temporal transformations and outliers within large corpora, ultimately with the goal to finding themes within the corpus. Additionally, by further examining the results within AntConc and Tableau using a close reading approach, which is supported by a theoretical framework on imaginaries, framing theory and discourse metaphors, it was found that Artificial Intelligence is mainly referred to in these publications as an emerging and innovative technology, which is considered to be the key to finding a solution to the problems within the European society. AI is largely connotated with positive rather than negatively implications and AI is frequently found in proximity of other emerging or supposedly new technologies. The publications analysed contain only a few mentions of possible risks or challenges of AI, suggesting a mainly optimistic view on AI by the European government. Potential discourse metaphors have been observed within the corpus. Lastly, the methodological challenges of using a distant reading approach are discussed.