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This article draws on the sociology of expectations to examine the construction of expectations of ‘ethical AI’ and considers the implications of these expectations for communication governance. We first analyse a range of public documents to identify the key actors, mechanisms and issues which structure societal expectations around artificial intelligence (AI) and an emerging discourse on ethics. We then explore expectations of AI and ethics through a survey of members of the public. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the role of AI in communication governance. We find that, despite societal expectations that we can design ethical AI, and public expectations that developers and governments should share responsibility for the outcomes of AI use, there is a significant divergence between these expectations and the ways in which AI technologies are currently used and governed in large scale communication systems. We conclude that discourses of ‘ethical AI’ are generically performative, but to become more effective we need to acknowledge the limitations of contemporary AI and the requirement for extensive human labour to meet the challenges of communication governance. An effective ethics of AI requires domain appropriate AI tools, updated professional practices, dignified places of work and robust regulatory and accountability frameworks.

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2This article draws on the concept of spatialisation to better understand the development of a digital games industry on the periphery of mainland Europe, on the island of Ireland.Positioning digital games within the cultural and creative industries, we explore how global networks of production in this industry get territorialized, negotiated and shaped by local factors. Drawing upon an industry-wide survey in Ireland we found that employment has grown by 400% in the last decade but that this rate of employment growth and its concentration in large urban areas masks significant ruptures and shifts which more detailed spatial, occupational and social analysis reveals: in particular, how the state, multinational game companies, and physical and human capital interact to shape an industry which is strong in middleware, localisation and support but weak in content development. An understanding of global digital games production networks and of occupational patterns in this industry is, we believe, crucial for national and European cultural policies for the digital games industry and for the cultural and creative industries more generally.