What can Analysis of the Organizations’ Web Sites tell us about AI? Comparative Study of the Online Resources operated at Google, Yandex, and Baidu

The current social and cultural debates on AI and how it is being embedded into the reality of social life have reignited scientific debates on how to study AI, what counts as data, and the conditions under which information and data pertaining AI turn into knowledge. In this paper the authors’ focus was exploring new sources of data on AI and methods of AI phenomena examination. The paper presents the results of a comparative analysis of Google, Yandex, and Baidu’s websites. Contrary to these companies commonly being perceived as online search engines, Google, Baidu, and Yandex have multiple offerings across mobile products and services, knowledge products, translation services, open platforms for startups, PC client software and AI technologies. In the first part of the paper the authors compare information presented on these companies’ websites about their goals, their technologies, how they define AI, the proclaimed social problems associated with using AI, and the forms of interaction between these companies and their audiences. The second part of the paper analyzes 20 projects that won the Google AI Impact Challenge contest. Analyzing these projects allowed for identifying areas of application of AI technologies inside and outside organizations, for characterizing AI’s potential roles as a mediator in relations between people, and finally for highlighting utopian and dystopian scenarios associated with implementing AI in social relations. In the conclusion the authors formulate a set of broader questions for social analytics concerning artificial intelligence grounded in the results of their analysis.