AI in the Public Eye: A Comprehensive Sentiment Analysis of Public Opinion Toward Artificial Intelligence on Social Media Platforms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving technology with far-reaching implications, and it has sparked intense public discussion on social media platforms. This study conducts a comprehensive sentiment analysis of AI-related posts on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit from 2017 to 2024, aiming to evaluate public perceptions and attitudes toward AI. Approximately 133,004 social media posts were analysed using a fine-tuned RoBERTa model for sentiment classification, along with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), n-gram analysis, and word co-occurrence mapping for topic modelling. The findings reveal that a considerable portion of social media users express negative sentiments towards AI (46.09%), followed by neutral sentiments (39.29%) and positive sentiments (14.62%). LDA analysis identified 20 distinct topics, including AI ethics, job impacts, and philosophical implications. Temporal analysis revealed a notable increase in AI-related discourse starting in 2022, accompanied by evolving sentiment patterns. The results reveal a complex landscape of public perception regarding AI, characterised by ongoing concerns about its societal impacts, coupled with a growing interest in the AI's technical aspects. Future research could explore cross-cultural perceptions of AI and examine how direct interactions with AI systems influence public attitudes.