Public Perception and Sentiment of ChatGPT: Machine Learning Analysis on Weibo Posts

ChatGPT, a large, pre-trained language model, which is developed by OpenAI, has exerted a great influence on society in all aspects since its launch. Knowing the adopters’ perspectives, preferences and sentiment is of critical significance for a technological company to promote and improve its products. Such social media as YouTube and Weibo, offer a convenient and time-saving channel for opinion mining. In this paper, 67,985 Weibo posts ranging from December 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023 were analyzed to explore the main topics and sentiment of users by employing machine learning techniques, including latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm and sentiment analysis. The results suggest that more than half of the adopters expressed a positive attitude towards all topics. However, a small portion of users have expressed worry and concern about the impact of ChatGPT on education and career compared to the other two topics, the development of the AI industry and the introduction of ChatGPT. This paper, while further proving the applicability of social media to explore the public’s opinion toward a new technology, offers insights into and contributes to the development and popularity of ChatGPT by figuring out Chinese users’ perspectives and sentiment.