Hallucinating a political future: Global press coverage of human and post-human abilities in ChatGPT applications

Abstract

In November 2022, the tech company OpenAI launched a groundbreaking chatbot model, ChatGPT. This unprecedented chatbot, characterized by an ease of use for lay internet users, gained immediate popularity and attracted extensive media attention. This article examines global press coverage of ChatGPT in peak reporting dates over the first full year of its existence. Based on a qualitative holistic narrative analysis, our findings point to two narrated scapes of political fear in the coverage of ChatGPT: The fear of the machine and the fear of the human. These attest to the collective imagining of an intensified future, where post-humanist interaction with political information is associated with exploitation, propaganda, and polarization of existing political rifts. We draw on the case study to articulate journalists’ role in signaling instability in the current political media ecosystem, and their construction of a techno-moral framework for society. We discuss an important blind-spot in journalists’ fulfilment of their normative role in fostering technology-informed citizens globally.