做 AI 社会影响研究或产品策略的团队，这篇论文提供了用社交媒体数据实时监测公众情绪的方法论，比传统调查更及时，值得参考。
研究团队利用 r/ChatGPT 子版块三年来的社交媒体数据，分析了 ChatGPT 的社会影响。他们提出了 PuLSE 框架，用于实时监测公众对 AI 产品的接受趋势。研究发现，ChatGPT 已从新奇技术逐渐成为日常消费品，但 GPT-4o 发布后，关于心理健康支持和情感依恋的帖子显著增加。PuLSE 早在 2024 年 10 月就检测到情感参与度的上升，比 OpenAI 公开承认早数月。该研究为理解 AI 产品的社会影响提供了新方法，并提供了交互式网站展示结果。
Three Years of r/ChatGPT: Societal Impact Evaluations from Social Media Data
ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022; the r/ChatGPT subreddit was created just one day later. Since then, chatbot-based AI products have gone from niche proofs-of-concept to widely-used household names. However, the ways in which adoption has developed among the public remains poorly understood. In this paper, we develop a framework for using social media as a data source for understanding the societal impact of widely-adopted consumer AI products, and propose PuLSE (Public and Longitudinal Signals for Evaluation), a general approach to monitoring for societally-impactful trends in real time. We apply our framework to conduct what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first longitudinal study of r/ChatGPT. We find that, overall, r/ChatGPT posts over time illustrate the normalization of ChatGPT as an everyday consumer product rather than an exceptional, novel technology. However, our retrospective analysis also finds that posts about using ChatGPT for mental health support, and posts about developing emotional attachments to ChatGPT, both rise steadily in frequency almost immediately after the launch of GPT-4o in May 2024. We show that PuLSE can detect the increase in emotional engagement as early as October 2024 -- months before OpenAI made any (public) acknowledgment of this impact. An interactive site to explore our results and methods, updated daily with live data, is available at rchatgpt-pulse.github.io.