Counter-narrative framing of AI harm

Coin and propagate a frame — a short phrase, a coined term, a slogan, a metaphor — that reorders how the press, the public, and policymakers see an AI system. "Stochastic parrots", "the coded gaze", "algorithmic colonialism", "no tech for ICE", "ban biometric mass surveillance": each names something that was previously diffuse and gives the movement a unit of shared vocabulary that travels through speeches, headlines, hashtags, and citations. The strategy is the deliberate, repeated authoring of these units, and the institutional support — papers, exhibitions, talks, op-eds — that anchors them.

An actor chooses framing because every other strategy in the movement depends on it. A frame that lands changes what counts as the default reading of an AI deployment, which in turn changes what regulators feel licensed to do, what journalists feel licensed to print, and what a target organisation can credibly defend. Insiders without a frame lose the rhetorical ground that organisers and researchers spent years preparing.

It trades off durability for reach. A frame can be co-opted (industry adopts "AI safety" and recasts it), inverted (opponents pick up the language with new meaning), or saturated (a slogan loses bite from over-use). Frames also do not, by themselves, change material conditions — they are necessary, not sufficient, infrastructure for the other strategies.