Winning and losing with Artificial Intelligence: What public discourse about ChatGPT tells us about how societies make sense of technological change

• Public AI launches serve as focusing events, sparking societal negotiation of meaning. • People negotiate meaning of AI based on their economic interests and cultural values. • Technical occupations adopt AI early positively; writing jobs join later, skeptically. • Individualism drives early engagement and more negative stances toward ChatGPT. • Aggregate stance shifts stem from speaker mix changes, not individual opinion change. Public product launches in Artificial Intelligence can serve as focusing events for collective attention, surfacing how societies react to technological change. Social media provide a window into the sensemaking around these events, surfacing hopes and fears and showing who chooses to engage in the discourse and when. We demonstrate that public sensemaking about AI is shaped by economic interests and cultural values of those involved. We analyze 3.8 million tweets posted by 1.6 million users across 117 countries in response to the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Our analysis shows how economic self-interest, proxied by occupational skill types in writing, programming, and mathematics, and national cultural orientations, as measured by Hofstede’s individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance dimensions, shape who speaks, when they speak, and their stance toward ChatGPT. Roles requiring more technical skills, such as programming and mathematics, tend to engage earlier and express more positive stances, whereas writing-centric occupations join later with greater skepticism. At the cultural level, individualism predicts both earlier engagement and a more negative stance, and uncertainty avoidance reduces the prevalence of positive stances but does not delay when users first engage with ChatGPT. Aggregate sentiment trends mask the dynamics observed in our study. The shift toward a more critical stance regarding ChatGPT over time stems primarily from the entry of more skeptical voices rather than a change of heart among early adopters. Our findings underscore the importance of both the occupational background and cultural context in understanding public reactions to AI.