Dr. Pascal König: "From tech wars to tech culture wars? “Value shaping” and “value signaling” in AI system design and governance"

Part of the series of lectures “Politics in Europe”

Date: 04.11.2025
Time: 16:30-18:00
Place: Bld. B3 1, lecture hall 1

The presentation is held in English

Event at LSF

 

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Dr. Pascal König

Pascal König is an assistant professor in Public Administration at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the VU Amsterdam. His research deals with questions related to Artificial Intelligence and Governance. It examines how Artificial Intelligence changes forms of decision-making and steering in government and public administration; how governments and other stakeholders shape the societal adoption of the technology; and how citizens perceive and evaluate Artificial Intelligence uses in government.

Before working at the VU Amsterdam, Pascal was an advisor at the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ). In this role, he planned and consulted development cooperation projects in the field of digital transformation. Previous to his work as a practitioner, he was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, an interim professor at the Technical University Munich and a postdoctoral researcher at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau and Goethe University Frankfurt. In his dissertation at the University of Freiburg, he studied what factors accounted for systematic differences in the strategic communication of governments during the financial crisis of 2008.

His work has been published in a variety of international journals, such as Big Data & Society, British Journal of Criminology, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Government Information Quarterly, Information Technology for Development, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Party Politics, Public Administration, Public Management Review, Regulation & Governance, Sustainable Cities and Society, and West European Politics.

 

Summary

As Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly sophisticated in emulating human communication and expressing social values, they also gain greater relevance for questions of culture and identity. This makes it important to take seriously the role of culture in AI in its own right. This article conceptualizes and illustrates major ways in which this value dimension becomes salient and provides an overview of conflicts over embedding culture and political ideology into generative AI systems. Besides an unintentional incorporation of values into AI, governments and businesses intentionally shape the values of AI systems – leading to tensions within and between societies and both on the level of AI system design and governance. Governments and businesses furthermore engage in value signaling as the open recognition of the fact that certain social values and political ideas are embedded in AI systems. These developments add an important facet to the politics of AI.