Last Week with ChatGPT: A Weibo Study on Social Perspective Regarding ChatGPT for Education and Beyond
Yao Tian, Chengwei Tong, Lik-Hang Lee, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Yong Liao,, and Pengyuan Zhou

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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education · Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
