‘More profound than fire or electricity’: The role of analogies in legitimizing ChatGPT’s revolutionary nature

Recent works in sociology have addressed the social embeddedness of AI artifacts and their impact on social and cultural life. However, media discourse has remained an invisible backdrop in relevant analyses. Little is known about how AI technologies are collectively interpreted as revolutionary or how public policy interacts with the sociotechnical imaginaries produced and sustained in mass-media representations. Merging frameworks from Critical Discourse Analysis and Cultural Sociology, this study employs a discourse analysis approach focused on analogies to elucidate the construction of ChatGPT’s revolutionary nature in the United States’ media discourse. It posits that sociotechnical systems’ qualities should not be conceived merely as ontic and independent of their linguistically mediated representations. Although customarily linked to legitimation through moral evaluation in the literature of discourse studies, this study demonstrates that analogical comparisons in the public arena encompass multiple strategies that legitimize ChatGPT’s sociocultural significance, thereby influencing the trajectory of institutional action.