Powerful tool or too powerful? Early public discourse about ChatGPT across 4 million tweets

This paper investigates initial exuberance and emotions surrounding ChatGPT's first three months of launch (1 December 2022-1 March 2023). The impetus for studying active discussions surrounding its implications, fears, and opinions is motivated by its nascent popularity and potential to disrupt existing professions; compounded by its significance as a crucial inflexion point in history. Capturing the public zeitgeist on new innovations-much like the advent of the printing press, radio, newspapers, or the internet-provides a retrospective overview of public sentiments, common themes, and issues.

Since launch, few big data studies delved into initial public discourse surrounding the chatbot. This report firstly identifies highest-engagement issues and themes that generated the most interaction; secondly, identifies the highest-engaged keywords on both sides of the sentiment valence scale (positive and negative) associated with ChatGPT.

We interrogate a large twitter corpus (n = 4,251,662) of all publicly available English-language tweets containing the ChatGPT keyword. Our first research aim utilizes a prominent peaks model (upper-quartile significance threshold of prominence>20,000). Our second research aim utilized sentiment analysis to identify, week-on-week, highest-frequency negative, and positive keywords and emojis.

Six prominent peaks were identified with the following themes: 'hype and hesitance', 'utility and misuse in professional and academic settings', 'demographic bias', 'philosophical thought experiments on morality' and 'artificial intelligence as a mirror of human knowledge'. Of high-frequency valence, negativity included credibility concerns, implicit bias, environmental ethics, employment rights of data annotators and programmers, the ethicality of neural network datasets. Positivity included excitement over application, especially in coding, as a creative tool, education, and personal productivity.

Overall, sentiments and themes were double-edged, expressing excitement over this powerful new tool and wariness toward its potential for misuse.