Visualizations of German news media articles on artificial intelligence (2019 and 2022/23)

We have conducted a quantitative visual content analysis of illustrated German national print media coverage on AI. Our analysis focuses on two time periods: on the one hand the time period between January 1 and December 31, 2019 has been analyzed and on the other hand the time period between November 1, 2022 and October 31, 2023. As news media titles, we chose six (leading) national quality newspapers and news magazines in Germany, namely: Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Die Welt (DW), taz, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit. All illustrated articles during the analysis period that contained the keywords ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘AI’[1] in their headline or subtitle (focus on articles that cover AI as a main topic) were selected for analysis. Our search resulted in 589 illustrated articles with n = 818 images in total (some articles contained more than one image). For each image we manually coded- formal features like medium, date, department and visualization type of the image,- the visual objects with different levels of detail (per image, several image objects [like human, robot, computer etc.] with multiple specifying subcategories could be coded, for example if an image shows a human and a robot at the same time),- the main AI subject covered in the article (using inductive coding of the article headlines, subtitles and text),- and the framing elements potential uses of AI (visualization of potential or real uses of AI in all areas of life with dominant positive connotations), danger potential (visualization of dangers that may arise from widespread hasty or non-critically reflected deployment of AI applications), competition (visualization of existing national and international competition in AI development, research and implementation, human role model (visualizations that show humans as an ideal role model for hard- and software, whose control is based on AI), (further) development (visualizations that focus on previous developments in the field of AI but also developmental work, which is still ongoing), and cultural and artistic debate (visualizations that show the cultural or artistic engagement with AI as a technology).[1] German search string: “Künstliche* Intelligenz” OR *KI*