“The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now – but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as Excel”: analysing topics, sentiment and emotions relating to ChatGPT on Twitter

Abstract

ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot system by OpenAI, gained significant attention and adoption in 2022 and 2023. By generating human-like conversations, it attracted over 100 million monthly users; however, there are concerns about the social impact of ChatGPT, including panic, misinformation and ethics. Twitter has become a platform for expressing views on ChatGPT and popular NLP approaches like topic modelling, sentiment analysis and emotion detection are commonly used to study public discourses on Twitter. While these approaches have limitations, an analytical process of existing best practices captures the evolving nature of these views. Previous studies have examined early reactions and topics associated with ChatGPT on Twitter but have not fully explored the combination of topics, sentiment and emotions, nor have they explicitly followed existing best practices. This study provides an overview of the views expressed on Twitter about ChatGPT by analysing 88,058 tweets from November 2022 to March 2023 to see if panic and concern were replicated in Twitter discourses. The topics covered human-like text generation, chatbot development, writing assistance, data training, efficiency, impact on business and cryptocurrency. Overall, the sentiment was predominantly positive, indicating that concerns surrounding ChatGPT were not widely replicated. However, sentiment fluctuated, with a decline observed around the launch of ChatGPT Plus. The discourse saw consistent patterns of trust and fear, with trust maintaining a steady presence until a decline potentially influenced by concerns about biases and misinformation. We discuss how our findings build upon existing research regarding ChatGPT by providing trajectories of topics, sentiment and emotions.