Between promises and threats: public perceptions between the fear of collapse and the myths of artificial intelligence

Abstract

This article examines how public digital conversation constructs artificial intelligence as either a threat or a promise. The problem addressed concerns how widely circulated journalistic content activates interpretive frames related to work, inequality, and economic futures. Methodologically, the study adopts a social listening approach based on social media data mining publicly available video comments. The method combines reproducible automated extraction with text analysis assisted by IRaMuTeQ, including word clouds, similarity analysis, descending hierarchical classification, and correspondence factor analysis. Results indicate that artificial intelligence is predominantly framed as a threat to material survival, structured around two main discursive grammars, collapse and redistribution, which vary according to media framing. The study concludes that public conversation operates as a discursive indicator of a technological transition perceived as rapid, asymmetric, and socially risky.