Social media discourse on AI use in education

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With the release of the free version of ChatGPT in Nov. 2022, the use of this AI-based chatbot has received both positive and negative comments. While there has been research on opinions on ChatGPT in education, there are, as yet, very limited results. Also, the focus has not yet been on Reddit and subreddits, such as r/ChatGPT, r/education, and r/teachers.  

We aim to determine the opinions on the use of ChatGPT in education on Reddit and how those might have changed over time, using keyword and sentiment analysis. We focus on the opinions on subreddits in general and how users react to those opinions using the voting system. The project will help us understand how the debate on ChatGPT has developed over time and if it entails sector-specific argumentation. The results and the corpus will be of interest to scholars and corporations, as they provide a foundation for future research on the topic and show public opinion of an important new technology in different domains. Furthermore, people’s opinions may be swayed by what they see on social media, and insight into people’s stance on AI use in education could help us make predictions and educated guesses on how AI will be received and used and how it might change the education system. Lastly, our study is linkable to other studies regarding discourse analysis, social media, education, and AI. While there are risks with our study, such as the difficulty of interpreting the keywords and its being limited and not necessarily representative, our methods are reliable and will, therefore, produce robust results. 

Our research questions are as follows: 

1. What are the most frequently used keywords in the Reddit discourse around ChatGPT in each domain, and what is the degree of their similarity or distinction? 
2. What is the general attitude expressed on Reddit towards the use of ChatGPT in education in subreddits focused on technology and education? 
3. Has this attitude changed over time, and if so, how? 
 
We will attempt to answer these questions by first making corpora with RStudio and RedditExtractoR using data from different subreddits. We will then make a keyword list using Python and Excel and conduct a keyword analysis. This will serve as a base for the sentiment analysis done using R and RStudio, both of all the data and separated by subreddit. Upvotes and downvotes will be considered as well. Lastly, we will compare the subreddits, compare the votes with the sentiment analysis, examine the change over time, and interpret our findings in a report.

And here the group in their own words: