The Emerging Social Status of Generative AI: Vocabularies of AI Competence in Public Discourse
Abstract
The emerging social status of generative AI as a social actor and interactant shapes the legitimacy of AI use. We study how the social status of generative AI takes shape in public discourse, through conflicting vocabularies of competence that justify AI’s alleged creativity or lack thereof. We analyze four sources of news, and we identify several discursive themes regarding the competence and worth of generative AI. There is a wide and nuanced spectrum of discursive positions, from AI as a competent and creative partner in work, to AI as a recombinant yet dumb tool, or quasi-creative magician. This debate reshapes public understanding of what it means to be creative and, ultimately, what is distinctive about humanity.
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DALL•E 3 can relieve users from prompt engineering by handling the brainstorming and refinement of prompts to ChatGPT, and generate images that stick to user descriptions.
“It can relieve users from prompt engineering by handling the brainstorming and refinement of prompts to ChatGPT, and generate images that stick to user descriptions.”
The recently released DALL•E 3 has integrated image generative AI with ChatGPT, a Large-Language Model (LLM).
“The recently released DALL•E 3 9 has integrated image generative AI with ChatGPT, a Large-Language Model (LLM).”
Cites
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922 · Cited by 6,988 · see citing works
Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
Ji, Z., Lee, N., Frieske, R., Yu, T., Su, D., Xu, Y., Ishii, E., Bang, Y. J., Madotto, A., & Fung, P. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3571730 · Cited by 5,025 · see citing works
Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents
Ramesh, A., Dhariwal, P., Nichol, A., Chu, C., & Chen, M. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.06125 · Cited by 2,511 · see citing works
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Newman, M., Sun, K., Dalla Gasperina, I. B., Shin, G. Y., Pedraja, M. K., Kanchi, R., Song, M. B., Li, R., Lee, J. H., & Yip, J. (2024) · Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3613904.3642492 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
Interplay of rationality and morality in using ChatGPT for academic misconduct
Zhang, L., Amos, C., & Pentina, I. (2025) · Behaviour & Information Technology · doi:10.1080/0144929x.2024.2325023 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Bran, E., Rughiniş, C., Nadoleanu, G., & Flaherty, M. G.
- Affiliations
- University of Bucharest (RO)
- Venue
- 2023 24th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2023-05
- Pages
- 391-398
- OpenAlex
- W4385934345
- Cited by
- 36
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 6
- FWCI
- 7.69
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Linguistics and Discourse Analysis
- Keywords
- generative AI, AI competencies, creativity, public discourse, news media, human uniqueness, discursive positions
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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