Turkina E.V., Severskaya O.I. Artificial intelligence, risk, and future technology: Artificial intelligence field development and its semantic potential within most frequent fields of contemporary media discourse

The article deals with the reconstruction of existing frequent lexical microfields and the analysis of new ones in contemporary media discourse. It defines their functional role in the structure of media texts. The focus is made on the methodology of forming a lexico‑semantic microfield based on media‑metric research. Within the main study, the linguistic image of new technologies in the media is reconstructed, where the discussion of scientific, technical, and technological achievements – neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, as well as their associated risks and threats – has become the dominant trend for the coming decade. The research material comprises media texts from the Main and Newspaper Parts of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the subcorpus “Regional Media,” and open social media. By applying corpus‑based methods to analyse the vocabulary of thematic groups in contemporary media texts, the authors found out that the microfields of the thematic group “Artificial Intelligence” intersect with other frequent thematic groups of modern media discourse (“Science and Technology” and “Risks”). Furthermore, the structure of the “Artificial Intelligence” microfield within these groups is determined through the integrated application of discourse, corpus‑based methods and content analysis. The approach mentioned above has been employed by the authors for the first time.