Last Week with ChatGPT: A Weibo Study on Social Perspective Regarding ChatGPT for Education and Beyond

TL;DR

This study analyzes Chinese social media discussions to understand public perceptions of ChatGPT's role in education and society, highlighting a shift from concern to optimism as AI capabilities advance.

Contribution

First investigation into how public opinion on ChatGPT evolves with AI development, using Weibo data to track social perspective changes over time.

Findings

ChatGPT discussions are 16 times more frequent than Baidu's Ernie Bot.

Initial fears included cheating and moral decline, while later attitudes became more positive.

Public opinion shifted from concern to optimism as AI capabilities improved.

Abstract

The application of AI-powered tools has piqued the interest of many fields, particularly in the academic community. This study uses ChatGPT, currently the most powerful and popular AI tool, as a representative example to analyze how the Chinese public perceives the potential of large language models (LLMs) for educational and general purposes. Although facing accessibility challenges, we found that the number of discussions on ChatGPT per month is 16 times that of Ernie Bot developed by Baidu, the most popular alternative product to ChatGPT in the mainland, making ChatGPT a more suitable subject for our analysis. The study also serves as the first effort to investigate the changes in public opinion as AI technologies become more advanced and intelligent. The analysis reveals that, upon first encounters with advanced AI that was not yet highly capable, some social media users believed that AI advancements would benefit education and society, while others feared that advanced AI, like ChatGPT, would make humans feel inferior and lead to problems such as cheating and a decline in moral principles. The majority of users remained neutral. Interestingly, with the rapid development and improvement of AI capabilities, public attitudes have tended to shift in a positive direction. We present a thorough analysis of the trending shift and a roadmap to ensure the ethical application of ChatGPT-like models in education and beyond.