Tracing AI Narratives in YouTube Videos through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Framework

The emerging application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses a substantial challenge to understanding how these technologies harm and benefit individuals and society. Our study focuses on the narratives of YouTube videos regarding AI. The narratives on these platforms develop meanings shared on the Internet and can have performative effects on the materiality of technology. Studying AI narratives is crucial to understanding the complexities of contemporary and future developments. One of the main challenges in the design, development, and deployment of these technologies concerns sustainable development, and the topic of sustainability has declined in environmental, social, technological, and economic terms. This research investigates the presence of these themes within the narratives on AI present on YouTube. YouTube hosts a wide range of content, including informative videos from public institutions, tech industries, experts, and creators. Such actors produce videos containing narratives about AI, which are then disseminated among platform users and other media channels. For this research, we used the YouTube search engine, looking for videos on AI and selecting those with a duration equal to or greater than 20 minutes. We extracted the subtitles from the videos, on which we performed a file structuring process and subsequent textual analysis. We argue that narratives, through their performativity, can influence the vision of sustainability, applying a selective power. This research addresses these narratives through a quantitative and qualitative exploration of sustainability through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) conceptual framework and the SDGs word list produced by Whittingham et al., 2023. This approach enables us to understand how the YouTube video narratives can be framed within the SDG conceptualisation. These narratives may influence relevant actors, shape government local policies, and influence corporate investments. They may also determine which technologies are developed, who benefits from them, and what possible future scenarios open or close.