Artificial Intelligence as Political Antagonism: Media Traces of a Displaced Super-Controversy

This article argues that public engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI), as it becomes visible through media traces, is structured less as a technoscientific controversy among competing publics than as a displaced form of political antagonism. Intervening in current STS debates on AI “super-controversy,” we revisit controversy studies and recent calls for controversy elicitation, which seek to revitalize democratic problematisation by fostering participation and extended expertise. While these approaches foreground conflict, they retain an implicit epistemic horizon in which legitimate participation is tied to articulated critique and the formation of lay expertise. Drawing instead on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of antagonism and populist logic, we propose an alternative analytical lens. In this perspective, conflict is not necessarily organized around shared objects of dispute, but around the construction of political frontiers through which heterogeneous grievances are articulated against a common adversary. Empirically, we analyse 1,148,092 comments posted on 4,244 TF1.info YouTube news videos (March 2022–May 2024), comparing AI with electric vehicles, nuclear technologies, and climate change, and mapping intersections with party-political publics. While quantitative measures suggest weak AI issue-public formation, qualitative analysis reveals predominantly vertical antagonism targeting elites and institutions. AI functions less as a technical object of debate than as a symbolic condensation of institutional power.