Winning and losing with Artificial Intelligence: What public discourse about ChatGPT tells us about how societies make sense of technological change

2025-07-09

AI Summary

This study investigates how occupational background and cultural values structurally shape global public attitudes toward AI-driven technological change following ChatGPT’s release. Analyzing 3.8 million tweets from 117 countries, we integrate Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, a skill-based occupational taxonomy, NLP techniques, and multilevel time-series regression. Results reveal that attitudinal polarization stems primarily from participant turnover—not opinion shift: early support from technical professionals is later counterbalanced by skeptical writers joining the discourse; individualistic cultures engage earlier but exhibit stronger critique, whereas high uncertainty avoidance attenuates positive sentiment. Moving beyond aggregate sentiment analysis, this work pioneers a dual occupational–cultural framework to explain the structural formation of AI-related public discourse, offering a generalizable, theoretically grounded model for analyzing societal responses to emerging technologies.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining

Abstract

Public product launches in Artificial Intelligence can serve as focusing events for collective attention, surfacing how societies react to technological change. Social media provide a window into the sensemaking around these events, surfacing hopes and fears and showing who chooses to engage in the discourse and when. We demonstrate that public sensemaking about AI is shaped by economic interests and cultural values of those involved. We analyze 3.8 million tweets posted by 1.6 million users across 117 countries in response to the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Our analysis shows how economic self-interest, proxied by occupational skill types in writing, programming, and mathematics, and national cultural orientations, as measured by Hofstede's individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance dimensions, shape who speaks, when they speak, and their stance towards ChatGPT. Roles requiring more technical skills, such as programming and mathematics, tend to engage earlier and express more positive stances, whereas writing-centric occupations join later with greater skepticism. At the cultural level, individualism predicts both earlier engagement and a more negative stance, and uncertainty avoidance reduces the prevalence of positive stances but does not delay when users first engage with ChatGPT. Aggregate sentiment trends mask the dynamics observed in our study. The shift toward a more critical stance towards ChatGPT over time stems primarily from the entry of more skeptical voices rather than a change of heart among early adopters. Our findings underscore the importance of both the occupational background and cultural context in understanding public reactions to AI.

Problem

• Analyzes public reactions to ChatGPT launch via Twitter data
• Examines how economic interests shape AI discourse timing and stance
• Investigates cultural values' influence on public engagement with AI

Innovation

• Analyzed 3.8M tweets across 117 countries
• Linked engagement to occupational skills
• Measured cultural impact using Hofstede dimensions