How Generative AI Was Mentioned in Social Media and Academic Field? A Text Mining Based on Internet Text Data

As ChatGPT has evolved, generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) has gone viral on the internet since 2022. Heated discussions on generative AI have appeared in both social media and academic field, generating massive textual data. Overwhelming media coverage of generative AI may lead to biased conception. To date, there has been no systematic analysis of how generative AI is mentioned on the internet. Moreover, little attention has been paid to demonstrating the gap in perceptions of generative AI between social media and academic field. This study seeks to focus on the following specific research questions: What are the key terms related to generative AI, what are the key term differences in social media and academic field on generative AI, and what are the topic differences of generative AI in social media and academic field? A text-mining approach supported by KH-coder was employed. The research data were drawn from two main text sources: the Sina Weibo platform and the CNKI periodical database. The results revealed statistically significant differences in key terms and topics related to generative AI between the social media and academic field. Our findings enhance the understanding of public ideas and the trend of generative AI on the internet, and provide supportive information for future studies on generative AI applications.