Detection of Change in the Senses of AI in Popular Discourse

Abstract

As chatbots, driverless cars and other robot-like applications become a part of everyday life, we are witnessing an increase in the popularization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the mass media. While this has some potential in terms of informing the public about technological development, it also makes the term a buzzword not pointing to any actual object with no agreed-upon meaning. AI is usually deployed as an umbrella term for sealing a variety of analytical tools such as intelligent decision support systems, deep learning, and computational linguistics disregarding their actual denotations. As the popular discourse and media represent its mundane features to connote miracles or apocalypses, AI gains a mythical status that can have different significations according to different cultural contexts. Our aim in this paper is to study the semantic shifts in the meaning of AI in different contexts by examining the mapping of the words to different semantic vector spaces over time. © 2023, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.