News Media Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: A Qualitative Analysis Across China, Germany, and the United States

Artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted much public interest, inspiring both hopes and fears. As countries define pathways for developing and implementing AI, healthcare is emerging as a priority sector. Sociotechnical imaginaries, which can mobilize public support and attract resources for realising sociotechnical visions, play an important role in the trajectories of emerging technologies. News media, in turn, are central to the negotiation, construction, and promotion of such imaginaries. We analyze how news media construct sociotechnical imaginaries of AI in healthcare in China, Germany, and the United States (US), three countries with differing healthcare and media systems, and sociopolitical and -cultural outlook on technologies. Drawing from a thematic analysis of articles from 15 newspapers, we find two powerful, cross-national, collectively held imaginaries: The first imaginary on enhancing healthcare with AI emerged across all three countries; the second imaginary on using AI to manage pandemics or epidemics was only fully developed in Chinese and US coverage, though present as an outlier in German news coverage. Lower-level divergences within each imaginary can be explained by systemic differences between the countries, such as the largely private US healthcare system, the mostly state-controlled Chinese media and healthcare systems, and the German hesitancy toward emerging technologies. This study provides evidence for how powerful imaginaries can emerge across very different sociopolitical and cultural contexts while accounting for contextual national factors.