Public Opinions on ChatGPT: An Analysis of Reddit Discussions by Using Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, and SWOT Analysis

The sudden arrival of AI (Artificial Intelligence) into people's daily lives all around the world was marked by the introduction of ChatGPT, which was officially released on November 30, 2022. This AI invasion in our lives drew the attention of not only tech enthusiasts but also scholars from diverse fields, as its capacity extends across various fields. Consequently, numerous articles and journals have been discussing ChatGPT, making it a headline for several topics. However, it does not reflect most public opinion about the product. Therefore, this paper investigated the public's opinions on ChatGPT through topic modelling, Vader-based sentiment analysis and SWOT analysis. To gather data for this study, 202905 comments from the Reddit platform were collected between December 2022 and December 2023. The findings reveal that the Reddit community engaged in discussions related to ChatGPT, covering a range of topics including comparisons with traditional search engines, the impacts on software development, job market, and education industry, exploring ChatGPT's responses on entertainment and politics, the responses from Dan, the alter ego of ChatGPT, the ethical usage of user data as well as queries related to the AI-generated images. The sentiment analysis indicates that most people hold positive views towards this innovative technology across these several aspects. However, concerns also arise regarding the potential negative impacts associated with this product. The SWOT analysis of these results highlights both the strengths and pain points, market opportunities and threats associated with ChatGPT. This analysis also serves as a foundation for providing recommendations aimed at the product development and policy implementation in this paper.