AI in the Public Eye: Analysing Social Media Sentiment and Opinion on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI), a rapidly evolving technology with far-reaching implications, has become a widely discussed topic on social media platforms. This study conducted a comprehensive sentiment analysis of posts discussing AI topics on Twitter, YouTube and Reddit from 2017 to 2024 to evaluate public perceptions and attitudes toward AI. A total of 133,004 social media posts were analysed using a fine-tuned RoBERTa model for sentiment classification, alongside Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), n-gram, and word co-occurrence mapping for topic modelling. The analysis revealed that 46.09% of the posts express negative sentiments about AI, followed by 39.29% neutral and 14.62% positive sentiments. LDA uncovered 20 key topics, including AI ethics, job impacts, and philosophical implications. Temporal analysis revealed a significant surge in AI-related discourse from 2022 onward, with evolving sentiment patterns. These findings suggest a complex landscape of public AI perception, reflecting persistent concerns about societal impacts alongside increasing interest in AI’s technical aspects.