New Publication Explores Global AI Imaginaries

How is the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) envisioned – and who shapes these visions? A new article by ZeMKI members Vanessa Richter and Christian Katzenbach investigates this question.

How is the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) envisioned – and who shapes these visions? A new article published in the Journal of Science Communication investigates this question. The article was led by our PGMT Lab member Vanessa Richter and co-authored by Prof. Christian Katzenbach as part of the project “Imaginaries of AI” (funded by the DFG and SNF, 450649594).

The study examines how key societal stakeholders – including actors from politics, industry, academia, media, and civil society – negotiate diverse and often conflicting imaginaries of AI in the U.S., China, and Germany. These imaginaries are not only culturally rooted but politically contested, and they play a crucial role in how AI is publicly discussed, governed, and implemented.

Challenging the notion of monolithic national perspectives, the comparative analysis highlights how shared global narratives, such as the “AI race,” take very different forms in each country – shaped by local discourses, institutions, and power dynamics. For example, while the EU emphasizes regulation and digital sovereignty, U.S. stakeholders often invoke innovation-driven competition, and in China, state-driven imaginaries dominate.

This publication shows how AI is discursively constructed as a sociotechnical phenomenon – and how governance is negotiated through competing visions of the future.

Read the article: Richter, V., Katzenbach, C. & Zeng, J. (2025). Negotiating AI(s) futures: Competing imaginaries of AI by stakeholders in the U.S., China, and Germany. JCOM 24(02), A08. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.24020208