Over the last decade, the rapid incursion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into society has induced what scholars call an “epistemic shock”, leaving industries, citizens, and researchers alike to grapple with its constantly evolving potentials, challenges, and implications. This dissertation takes its starting point from a dual interest in this shock effect caused by AI, by, on the one hand, aiming to empirically explore new forms of domain-specific knowledge practices emerging in response to AI, while on the other, taking a more conceptual interest in how we can critically study AI’s entry into society.

In the dissertation, Hansen conceptualises these emerging AI knowledge practices as epistemic interventions and argues that they are crucial to understanding how AI becomes entangled in and reshapes domain practices, as they render the conditions of possibilities for AI’s entry into a domain visible. Empirically, the dissertation zooms in on the media sector, reporting on a multi-site ethnographic enquiry that examines different epistemic interventions across four field sites, including the Journalism AI Academy for Small Newsrooms, the Associated Press’ (AP) Local News AI Initiative, the “Recommendations Team” at the BBC, and the Media Museum located at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Together, these empirical studies demonstrate how AI is constituted within the media domain and becomes constitutive of today’s media reality through these particular AI knowledge practices, and make visible who has epistemic power and agency in these processes. With these findings, the dissertation contributes to scholarship at the intersections of Critical AI Studies, STS, Media Studies, and, more specifically, Journalism Studies.

You can find UvA dissertations in the UvA-DARE database.