The Influence of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Country Reputation

This project examines how Large Language Models (LLMs) shape a country's reputation from multiple perspectives. LLMs act simultaneously as mirrors and agents of societal narratives, reflecting and influencing public discourse about countries. By analyzing how LLMs mediate country-specific information and how individuals interact with AI-generated content, we investigate their potential to alter perceptions on a global scale. Further, we explore how these systems might be leveraged for measuring and strategically managing a country's reputation.

This project is a collaboration between Prof. Diana Ingenhoff (Organizational Communication and Public Diplomacy) and Prof. Olivier Furrer (Marketing) from the Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences.

Aim

The project aims to deepen our understanding of AI’s role in a country’s reputation by:

  • National Narratives: Investigating how LLMs process, generate and reinforce national narratives and country-specific stories, including the possibility that they may perpetuate biases or reshape common perceptions.
  • Human-AI Interaction: Exploring how people engage with LLMs and how AI-generated narratives about countries influence individual attitudes, trust, and beliefs.
  • Strategic Communication Management: Demonstrating how LLMs can be harnessed for reputation measurement, detecting risks and opportunities to support proactive country reputation strategies.

Connecting the Dots: Building Resilience at National and Individual Levels

Thereby, the project places a focus on resilience: Consistent with the notion of resilience as a nation’s capacity to anticipate, absorb, and recover from disruptions (e.g., harmful or misleading AI outputs, false information), this project highlights two resilience fronts:

  1. National-Level Resilience: Supporting governments and institutions in navigating reputational shocks caused by LLM-driven misrepresentations. By understanding how AI systems generate narratives and how these narratives spread, stakeholders can adapt their strategies and uphold a robust country image.
  2. Individual-Level Resilience: Empowering users to critically assess AI-generated content, fostering media literacy, and ensuring that citizens develop informed perspectives rather than passively absorbing potentially skewed outputs.

With this dual focus on the nation’s adaptive capacity and the public’s critical engagement with AI, we aim to provide practical insights that not only safeguard and strengthen national reputation in the evolving AI era but also build resilience at both the national and individual levels.

Methodology

The study employs a multi-method approach combining theoretical and empirical components. It begins with developing a theoretical framework to conceptualize the interplay between AI technologies and a country‘s reputation. This is followed by agent-based testing of LLMs using standardized content analysis to understand how they process and present country information. An online experiment examines user interactions with LLMs when seeking country-related information, analyzing how LLM-generated content influences country perception. Finally, automated content analysis is conducted to efficiently process large datasets and identify patterns in country representations across different LLMs, enabling tracking changes in country reputation over time and across various AI systems.

Project team

News and publications

June 20, 2024: Project presentation and discussion at Presence Switzerland, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs FDFA 

November 22, 2024: Keynote Speech “Towards AI-Individualism: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Sociality and Free Speech” by Prof. Dr. Petter Bae Brandtzæg (University of Oslo, expert on generative artificial intelligence, innovations, and social media) and workshop on “Artificial Intelligence as a research instrument, source of Information, and tool for communication in communication science and practice”, supported by Lecture Series Mobilière-UniFr "Future of Switzerland"

Fall 2024 - Spring 2025: Research seminar on “Digital personalities: Experiments on the impact of artificial intelligence in strategic communication” (Prof. Dr. Diana Ingenhoff)

May 23, 2025: Research paper presentation at the Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research (SACM) in Chur, Switzerland, on “Challenges of the duality of artificial intelligence as a tool and source of information for communication science” (Pedrazzi, S., Vinzenz, F., Ingenhoff, D., & Furrer, O.)

May 27, 2025: Keynote Speech on LLM content analysis and research workshop by Prof. Dr. Thomas Hills (University of Warwick), supported by Lecture Series Mobilière-UniFr "Future of Switzerland" – further information will follow soon.

January 22, 2026, Zurich, 5 p.m.: Executive Forum and Workshop on “Building Resilience with AI: Navigating Reputational Opportunities and Risks for Countries and Companies“ – further information will follow soon

This research cluster is the result of a collaboration with our partner: