Agenda Setting and Discursive Power in the German AI Discourse

Due to promises of groundbreaking technologies and a considerable hype, the issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is receiving increasing attention. Besides the focus on innovation driven by actors in business and research, it is primarily political and media actors who take on ethical and legal considerations, such as human-centredness or discrimination, and thus shape the discourse. Despite the extensive engagement with (inter)national AI strategies and their coverage in the media, the interconnection of these two spheres with regard to AI technologies is largely unexplored. Against this background, this paper traces the discursive structures of the AI debate, using an innovative combination of the agenda-setting approach and the discursive power concept.