Generative AI, generating crisis: framing opportunity and threat in AI governance

The public release of high-profile generative AI models in late 2022 and early 2023 spurred widespread concerns over ‘existential threats’ to humanity from AI. This paper explores how this AI ‘crisis’ impacted ongoing approaches to AI, altering policymakers’ strategies to govern these technologies. Drawing on policy analysis approaches that highlight the role of ideas, this paper finds that, in response to perceived crisis and a frame of threat to humanity’s public interest, the UK shifted their governance approach to AI. It suggests that digital agenda-setting power in the policymaking arena is emerging as a distinct site of power in the digital era – one with the potential to mitigate or exacerbate the myriad effects from using digital technologies. Exploring AI policymaking as a site of contestation, between actors, ideas and interests, supports understandings of dimensions of power and control in the digital era.