Less Hype, More Drama: Open-Ended Technological Inevitability in Journalistic Discourses About AI in the US, The Netherlands, and Brazil

This article examines the portrayal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalistic discourses, nuancing assumptions that such coverage constitutes systematic media hype. Building on Pfaffenberger’s (Citation1992) concept of technological drama, we conducted a qualitative textual analysis of AI coverage in three newspapers of record—The New York Times (US), De Volkskrant (Netherlands), and Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil)—focusing on the period between June 2020 and September 2023. The findings indicate that these depictions constitute a multi-faceted drama whose importance is, however, at no point disputed. We theorize this phenomenon as a form of open-ended technological inevitability, where AI’s impact is seen as unavoidable but its trajectory remains undecided.