McGill paper: North American AI coverage skews cautionary

North American news articles about AI carry negative sentiment at a predicted rate of 33.1%, versus 12.8% to 14.7% in China, India, and the Middle East. The gap is the central finding of "The Many Morals of AI", a preprint by Andrew Piper and Edie Pearman of McGill University.

Working from a corpus of 12,924 English-language articles published since 2022 across the four regions, the authors prompted GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash to extract an implicit "story moral" from each piece. They report 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."

The keywords skew the same way. "North American coverage disproportionately emphasizes skepticism, risk, exploitation, greed, and bias, while placing less emphasis on innovation-related values such as development, prosperity, progress, and competitiveness, as well as social values such as collaboration, community, and cooperation," the paper reports.

Is North America more worried about AI, or more worried in general? The authors ran the same analysis on non-AI comparison articles from the same outlets to check. "The North America–other regions gap declined from 15.1 percentage points before sentiment adjustment to 5.0 points afterward." Two-thirds of the cautionary tilt turns out to be baseline regional media posture; the remainder is AI-specific.

Within North America, the mood depends on the sector. "Negatively valenced industries cluster around media and entertainment (along with law), with politics exhibiting the highest level of concern. Other industries such as healthcare, semiconductors, retail and finance were generally more positively portrayed."

The corpus was pulled from Dow Jones Factiva, running from Jan. 1, 2022 through Sept. 9, 2024. A couple of the researchers we track in our Who's Who had the link up this week.