Künstliche Intelligenz und Topos

There is a growing awareness that critical questioning of AI is no less important than critical questioning of discourses on AI. When it comes to AI, much seems to begin in discourse, and this implies the need to examine the underlying topoi of discourses and their relationships. The article explores the topoi reflected in AI-related discourses, and, associated with this, the question of agency of discursively constructed subjects: Who acts, transforms, creates, who/what is treated, to whom does something happen? After methodological considerations (chapter 2) and a brief overview of the current state of research on AI-related topoi in German (chapter 3), the empirical section (chapter 4) examines AI-related DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) word profiles, i.e. corpus-based systematic presentation of collocations of selected terms according to their syntactic relations. The concluding section (chapter 5) then attempts to draw up a preliminary and by no means exhaustive inventory of AI-related topoi that can be corroborated by corpus linguistic methods.