ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1569313
This article is part of the Research TopicAI and CommunicationView all 7 articles
Looking inside the black box – semantic investigations on a frequently used expression beyond AI
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- 2Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
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Talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a black box is a current phenomenon in scientific communication as well as in journalistic reporting on this topic. Yet, for several years we can observe an increasing use of the expression black box in further contexts like economics or politics not related to AI. This leads to the question of which aspects of meaning are associated with the expression and how the respective context of use might influence the constitution of the specific semantic features. Furthermore, it raises the question, which evaluative features accompany the expression as this might have an impact on the perception of the entity referred to as a black box. In our paper, we investigate these questions based on 288 contemporary articles from German speaking journalistic publications. Thus, we aim to shape the conceptualization of black box in contemporary language use.
Keywords: black box, artificial intelligence, Conceptualization, Discourse linguistics, Journalistic coverage, metaphor, semantic features
Received: 03 Feb 2025; Accepted: 20 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Köhler, Attar, Buresch and Hanauska. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Anna-Marie Köhler, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, 72074, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Patrizia Fatna Attar, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
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