Does ChatGPT change artificial intelligence-enabled marketing capability? Social media investigation of public sentiment and usage

The recent advent of ChatGPT has stirred substantial attention and debates, potentially altering the dynamics across various industries, notably marketing. This pioneering study delves into the public reactions and applications of ChatGPT within marketing realms. Leveraging a text-mining methodology, a corpus of over 600,000 tweets harvested before and after ChatGPT’s launch from January 2021 to April 2023 was scrutinized to gauge public sentiment towards AI-incorporated tools in marketing, and to unearth the predominant themes within public discourse. Initial findings unveiled a buoyant public sentiment towards AI-facilitated tools, which however, ebbed in January 2023, driven by apprehensions regarding AI technology’s limitations and potential perils. Subsequent months witnessed a rebound in sentiment, stabilizing above the positive threshold, as Twitter users increasingly acknowledged ChatGPT’s prospective merits on employment and daily lives. However, compared to the period before the introduction of ChatGPT, there has been a decline in the general public’s sentiment towards AI in marketing. Furthermore, the analysis discerned a convergence in the core topics broached by the public concerning AI and ChatGPT’s ramifications on marketing. While the automation of mundane tasks and heightened customer experience were lauded, trepidations surrounding job displacement and the ethical quandaries of supplanting human labor with machines surfaced. This exposition recommends that enterprises meticulously assess the prospective impact of AI on their personnel, advocating for the judicious and ethical deployment of such emergent technologies.