A co-oriented crisis communication model for an AI scansis: A Case of Chatbot, Lee-Luda

Abstract

This study proposed an integrated co-oriented crisis communication model by incorporating the co-orientation model with the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). By applying the proposed model to a crisis that happened to a South Korean AI company, Scatter Lab, this study attempted to answer the research question on how incorporating co-orientation to SCCT can help us understand a scandalized crisis, or scansis, when AI technology lies in the center of the crisis (defined in this paper as an AI crisis). Our findings showed that, in the case of Scatter Lab, the organization’s failure to accurately understand both the public’s perception of the crisis (2nd-level co-orientation) the discrepancy between the organization’s and the public’s perceptions (3rd-level co-orientation). In other words, the organization’s inaccurate understanding of the public’s perception of the crisis led to moral outrage, scandalizing the crisis into a scansis. We discuss why the nature of AI technology can complicate the assessment of accurate crisis type. This study contributes to SCCT literature, incorporating the SCCT framework with the co-orientation model further to explain scansis, a relatively new crisis type that was recently added to SCCT.