Humanness Inversion in AI Care Discourse: Humanising Robots and Erasing Care Workers in South Korean News Media

ABSTRACT

Existing studies have examined AI eldercare, anthropomorphic care technologies, and the devaluation of feminised care labour. Yet little is known about how public discourse humanises machines while rendering human care workers less visible. To fill this gap, this study examines how AI care robots are represented in South Korean news media and how these representations position human care workers. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of 75 articles selected from a corpus of 2077 Korean‐language news articles published in 2025, the study identifies a recurring discursive mechanism, which I call humanness inversion. The findings of this study suggest that AI care robots are endowed with the qualities conventionally associated with human care of warmth, companionship, vigilance, filial obligation, and moral responsibility, while human care workers are rendered absent, inefficient, or replaceable. This inversion operates through three dominant patterns of relational inversion, efficiency inversion, and heroic inversion, alongside a minority counter‐discourse that seeks to reclaim the relational and labour‐intensive dimensions of care. The study contributes to theories of dehumanisation, care work, and AI discourse by showing that humanness is not only denied to marginalised workers but can also be publicly transferred to non‐human actors. The results of this study also highlight the need for organisations, policymakers, and journalists to frame AI care technologies as supports for human care rather than substitutes.