| Summary: | <p>Part hype, part hysteria, part thoughtful debate, the public conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve. Commentators, journalists, politicians, and publics now debate myriad topics concerning AI, from the benefits and risks of automation, to the role of AI in geopolitics and warfare, to the hidden biases of algorithmic discrimination.</p>
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<p>News media do much to shape this evolving public discussion of AI. Not only do they provide a space for public conversation, but news reporting and commentary also provide and mediate evidence, arguments, values, and meanings. Similarly, the people who populate news content as sources and story subjects give shape to reporting and commentary by providing examples and anecdotes, giving testimony, providing context, and evaluating claims.</p>
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<p>Within news articles about science and technology, academic researchers frequently serve as story subjects and sources, providing useful first-hand experience and specialised technical understanding. For coverage of topics like artificial intelligence, where reporting is heavily influenced by industry hype (Chuan et al. 2019) and future expectations (Natale and Ballatore 2017), academic researchers can provide a unique and independent perspective, often distinct from that of industry sources, politicians, or policy makers. Specifically, researchers can provide detailed and realistic assessments of the capabilities, limitations, risks, and potential of AI.</p>
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<p>Building on a previous finding that academics make up around 17% of sources in news articles on AI (Brennen et al. 2018), this factsheet looks more closely at who are the academics serving as sources for news stories in the UK and the US. Specifically, it examines and models the news mentions of the 150 most cited academic experts in artificial intelligence in both the UK and the US. Analysis of these data reveals three main findings:</p>
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<ul><li>News mentions are concentrated on a very small number of high-profile scholars: in both countries the ten most mentioned scholars account for more than 70% of news mentions in the sample.</li>
<li>The researchers who appear most regularly in the news are not necessarily the most widely cited by their academic peers and many of them have strong ties to industry. The 16% of scholars across countries who are affiliated with industry account for 64.8% of all news mentions, but only 18.3% of academic citations. Scholars with an industry affiliation are more likely to have many times more news mentions in both the UK and the US. We find no statistically significant relation between academic citations and news mentions in this sample.</li>
<li>Many of the scholars who feature most frequently in the news are men, and the overwhelming majority of all AI researchers who appear in the news are men. Only 6% of the sample are women, who account for 6.7% of news mentions and 4.2% of Google Scholar citations.</li></ul>
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<p>Given the breadth and diversity of AI research across academia, public conversation would benefit from journalists including and highlighting a wider set of the most prominent academics to provide first-hand expertise on the actual capabilities, limitations, and risks of AI research. At the same time, as more and more academic AI researchers are becoming affiliated with companies, it remains unclear what influence industry affiliation has on the way AI researchers publicly share and discuss their work.</p>
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