  ChatGPT sets a new record with the fastest-growing user base, as a chatbot
powered by a large language model (LLM). While it demonstrates state-of-the-art
capabilities in a variety of language-generation tasks, it also raises
widespread public concerns regarding its societal impact. In this paper, we
investigated public attitudes towards ChatGPT by applying natural language
processing techniques such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling to Twitter
data from December 5, 2022 to June 10, 2023. Our sentiment analysis result
indicates that the overall sentiment was largely neutral to positive, and
negative sentiments were decreasing over time. Our topic model reveals that the
most popular topics discussed were Education, Bard, Search Engines, OpenAI,
Marketing, and Cybersecurity, but the ranking varies by month. We also analyzed
the occupations of Twitter users and found that those with occupations in arts
and entertainment tweeted aboutChatGPT most frequently. Additionally, people
tended to tweet about topics relevant to their occupation. For instance,
Cybersecurity is the most discussed topic among those with occupations related
to computer and math, and Education is the most discussed topic among those in
academic and research. Overall, our exploratory study provides insights into
the public perception of ChatGPT, which could be valuable to both the general
public and developers of this technology.
