Shaping the AI debate: building the public interest community’s narrative power
How we talk about Artificial Intelligence matters.
Elon Musk has become a trillionaire by persuading investors of his mission “to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” Anthropic has supercharged its valuation while warning that its Mythos model is so dangerous it could upend nations’ entire economic and security infrastructures.
These are not just compelling stories that fire the public imagination. They have real life consequences, endowing tech companies with the money and power to determine the direction that AI will take – and so decide how technologies will affect our societies.
The European AI & Society Fund’s mission is to grow the power of the public interest community in Europe to shape the direction of Artificial Intelligence so that AI serves everyone and not just the powerful few. To do that we need to look at the role of narratives – the stories through which we understand technologies.
How Big Tech is controlling narratives that shape society
Research conducted by Rootcause and supported by the Fund found not only that representatives of the tech industry monopolise media coverage of AI, but that the underpinning ways in which AI is framed overwhelmingly serve industry, and to a lesser extent government, interests.
This is borne out in practice. The community we support has identified the dominant narratives around AI as one of the most significant barriers to success. The pervasive acceptance of beliefs such as the idea that regulation stifles innovation, that AI is ‘inevitable progress’ or that AI can ‘solve’ national security can prove an insurmountable obstacle to those advocating for legislative protections that safeguard the public’s rights and interests.
Recent research commissioned by the Green Screen Coalition and others has shown for instance how a greenwashing narrative that AI can ‘solve’ climate change “misdirects from the immediate costs of giant energy and water intensive data centres being imposed on communities worldwide.”
As long as such dominant narratives work against the public interest, it will be hard to shift the direction of AI.
Civil society needs support to shape the AI debate
Growing our community’s power to shape the debate is a pillar of the Fund’s new five-year strategy. To start to understand how we can shift dominant narratives, we worked with Luminate and the Future Narratives Lab to explore how equipped European civil society organisations are to challenge the current paradigm and rewrite the AI story.
Through interviews, roundtables and a survey, the research found:
- Civil society groups have a strong appetite to shift narratives, seeing this as a crucial part of how large tech companies exert their power.
There is recognition of the value of narrative work and a clear understanding that focusing solely on short-term goals is limiting. Policy or legislative victories may not last if the underlying societal narratives do not also shift. Groups are keen to break out of reactive communications, do more long-term narrative building and have a strong appetite to work collaboratively on this. In particular they wish to escape the technical and jargon-heavy policy bubble many inhabit and establish how their missions are rooted in issues that affect the wider public.
- There is limited capacity to do this work due to a lack of funding and relevant skill sets
Especially when compared to the massive teams and resources that Big Tech can dedicate, civil society organisations are overstretched and lack dedicated personnel with specific expertise in strategic communications or narrative building. Organisations need to deepen their understanding of how different approaches benefit narrative change and how to deploy them effectively to achieve their goals. And as a community, it’s important to appreciate how various tactics can complement and support one another.
Research participants also highlighted how dependence on short term funding – which typically demands immediate measurable results – directs efforts away from the long-term work of shifting underlying societal beliefs.
The emergent communications infrastructure in the field, through initiatives such as the Maybe, the Better Information Project and the New Economy Organizers Network (NEON), is generally welcome. But these are not seen as sufficient to address the scale of the challenge. And there needs to be investment to enable work with actors who are anchored in movements where the impacts of AI are being most keenly felt.
- There are some perceived barriers to this work, the greatest being the lack of an articulated alternative vision for AI.
To hold tech companies to account, civil society has tended to focus on the harmful impacts of AI and a critique of the current paradigm. But this means groups are missing positive alternatives to work towards that are rooted in a wider societal vision. Participants in the research identified that this creates fatalism and apathy around AI. Addressing this gap will be critical to build narrative power.
Building the public interest community’s narrative power
This research shows the appetite and readiness in the tech justice movement to take on the narratives challenge. It creates a useful foundation for philanthropy to begin addressing this critical part of shifting power over the trajectory of AI.
The European AI & Society Fund is building on the findings of this research and developing grantmaking and fieldbuilding to meet some of the needs identified. We aim to announce new programmes soon. If you are interested in hearing more about these and applying for funding opportunities as they become available, please make sure that you sign up to our newsletter.
If you are a funder who would like to know about the research and findings in greater depth, please get in touch with Catherine.