This Researcher Is Decoding Thailand's AI Story
When Thailand's government wrote artificial intelligence into its national roadmap, Ploypilin Pruekcharoen started reading the news differently.
The third-year Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech's Digital Media program, based in the Technology Square Research Building, has spent the past year collecting and analyzing more than 100 Thai news articles about AI in tourism. Her question is simple: when a country stakes part of its economic future on artificial intelligence, how does its press explain that technology to the public, and who gets left out of the story?
"AI is a buzzword now," Pruekcharoen said. "I'm interested in how people conceptualize, portray and visualize it in a way that's not just AI as a word, but AI as something."
From Design Studios to Data Questions
Pruekcharoen's path to that question runs through three institutions and two coasts. She studied human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, where early projects in qualitative and ethnographic research sparked her interest in the space where design and research meet. A master’s in integrated design and media at New York University pushed her toward interactive installations and multimedia art.
At Georgia Tech, working under professor Yanni Loukissas, she has fused those threads into a practice she describes as research through design, or research through making. Her guiding interest is how data and algorithms shape the way people experience and understand the world around them.
That approach powered the Plasmatic Mirror, an interactive installation on the Media Bridge at the Georgia Tech Library that turned microplastics data into a visceral, full-body encounter. Pruekcharoen served as lead designer and researcher on the project, led the writing of the resulting paper and presented it in the pictorial track at the Designing Interactive Systems conference this past June.
"We can involve the bodies of the audience in the interactions to let them not just understand the data, but have a more visceral experience with it," she said.
A Non-Western Lens
The Plasmatic Mirror asked how people experience data in person. Pruekcharoen's newest work asks how they experience it in print, and in a very different place.
"Because I'm from Thailand and grew up in a small town there, I'm interested in how data can be experienced differently, especially in local and peripheral contexts," she said. "Something that is outside the center, a non-Western perspective."
That interest has pulled her research toward the geopolitics of data and algorithms. Her current project applies critical discourse analysis to Thai news coverage of what she calls tourism AI.
"Basically, it's the kind of AI tools that are used in tourism businesses, like hotels, marketing, advertisements, personalized tourism," she said.
The timing is deliberate. Thailand's National AI Strategy and Action Plan, approved in 2022 and updated through annual reports, designates tourism as a priority sector for AI adoption from 2024 through 2027. Pruekcharoen is collecting articles published from 2024 through May 2026, searching Thai-language sources for coverage at the intersection of AI and tourism, then examining the themes underneath.
"I'm focusing on the themes around power dynamics and social issues," she said. "Who benefits from tourism AI, and who might be included and excluded in the news."
Safety, Surveillance and Trust
One early pattern stands out. After incidents involving the kidnapping of foreign tourists rattled confidence in Thailand as a destination, news coverage began promoting AI as a trust-building tool, from AI-equipped CCTV cameras to AI-powered translation and dubbing for communicating with international visitors.
"From the news coverage, it seems to be portrayed in a way that's really benefiting both the locals and the tourists," Pruekcharoen said.
“I want to understand how people meet AI, make sense of it, and push back against it.”
As a researcher, she reads those stories with a more skeptical eye. "We see a lot of AI mistakes and hallucinations," she said, noting that deploying the technology in surveillance and safety systems at a national scale carries risks the coverage rarely examines. It is a tension familiar to Atlanta, where the use of AI in public surveillance has drawn its own scrutiny, and it underscores why her work resonates well beyond Thailand.
What Comes Next
The tourism AI project remains in progress, and Pruekcharoen is careful to note that her findings are still taking shape.
What ties it all together is a conviction that data is never neutral, whether it flows across a library bridge on campus or through the pages of a newspaper in Bangkok.