  Analyses of text corpora over time can reveal trends in beliefs, interest,
and sentiment about a topic. We focus on views expressed about artificial
intelligence (AI) in the New York Times over a 30-year period. General
interest, awareness, and discussion about AI has waxed and waned since the
field was founded in 1956. We present a set of measures that captures levels of
engagement, measures of pessimism and optimism, the prevalence of specific
hopes and concerns, and topics that are linked to discussions about AI over
decades. We find that discussion of AI has increased sharply since 2009, and
that these discussions have been consistently more optimistic than pessimistic.
However, when we examine specific concerns, we find that worries of loss of
control of AI, ethical concerns for AI, and the negative impact of AI on work
have grown in recent years. We also find that hopes for AI in healthcare and
education have increased over time.
