Shared Utopias, distinct anxieties: Sociotechnical imaginaries of AI-in-journalism in American, French and Chinese newspapers (2019-2025)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not merely a technical tool in journalism; its use reflects and reshapes different journalistic cultures. Using corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), this comparative study examines 329 articles published between 2019 and 2025 in newspapers from the United States, France, and China about AI-in-journalism. Results show that utopian and dystopian sociotechnical imaginaries (SIs) of AI-in-journalism functioned as constitutive pairs. While the utopian imaginary travelled easily across all national contexts, articulations of dystopian imaginaries diverged along journalistic cultures, yielding three distinct SIs: precarious AI-exploited journalism (the United States), resistant human-guarded journalism (France), and disciplined AI-powered journalism (China). These imaginaries revealed how narratives of AI reflect and reconstitute anxieties in journalistic cultures, demonstrating the co-production of technological and social orders. Theoretically, the study makes two contributions. First, it inverts the SI lens of “desirable futures” to show how undesirable futures of AI-in-journalism reflect each journalistic culture’s own characteristics. Second, it puts the Worlds of Journalism Study in dialogue with the SI framework, suggesting that the cultural meanings of news production shape how the meaning of AI is being discursively constructed.