Exploring Public Converse on AI via Reddit: A Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis Approach

The 21st Century is a compressed century, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in the new phase of digital transformation, disrupting various aspects of society, including art, education, and healthcare. Throughout this process, the public has responded with multifarious perspectives. Understanding these viewpoints can help foster responsible AI development by analyzing both its benefits and challenges. While many current studies focus solely on products from OpenAI, such as ChatGPT, this study takes a more comprehensive approach. Data were collected via Application Programming Interface (API) from AI-related subreddits on Reddit, one of the largest social platforms in the United States. This dataset was used to train three topic modeling algorithms: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), and Bertopic. After comparing these models based on various metrics, topic representation was fine-tuned using a semi-AI approach. Subsequently, a high-dimensional analysis was conducted through techniques such as sankey diagrams, dynamic topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. The results reveal online concerns regarding AI and this study further analyzes users' behaviors and discusses broader implications.