Threat or Trailblazer: Does News on Sophia the Robot Sustain the Robotic Imaginary?

Abstract

Recent research has shown that robotics companies use misleading marketing content to promote their prototypes, which may lead to problems such as emotional and financial exploitation if this content spreads and becomes part of the robotic imaginary. A notable example of this is Hanson Robotics, the company behind Sophia the Robot. As of yet, it is unclear how news media interact with this marketing content. The existing literature on robotrelated news focuses on other aspects, such as intimate human-robot relations, overlooking the misleading marketing material. Therefore, in this exploratory thesis, a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and LDA-based topic modeling was used to explore a manually gathered corpus of 111 online news articles in English about Sophia the Robot. During this exploration, the central questions were: 1) which recurring topics are the most prevalent in these articles, and 2) to what extent do these topics reflect exaggerated portrayals of Sophia? The corpus contained traces of moral panics and various topics in which Sophia was portrayed as more competent than she is in reality, indicating that some news media further propagate the misleading marketing material. Therefore, readers and writers should be vigilant when consuming or creating robot-related news, and additional research is needed to further explore the presence and danger of exaggerated AI-related messaging.