Last Week with ChatGPT: A Weibo Study on Social Perspective regarding ChatGPT for Education and Beyond

Abstract: ChatGPT has piqued the interest of many fields, particularly in the academic community. GPT-4, the latest version, starts supporting multimodal input and output. This study examines social media posts to analyze how the Chinese public perceives the potential of ChatGPT for educational and general purposes. The study also serves as the first effort to investigate the changes in public opinion since the release of GPT-4. According to the analysis results, prior to GPT-4, although some social media users believed that AI advancements would benefit education and society, some believed that advanced AI, such as ChatGPT, would make humans feel inferior and lead to problems such as cheating and a decline in moral principles, while the majority remain neutral. Interestingly, public attitudes have tended to shift in a positive direction since the release of GPT-4. We present a thorough analysis of the trending shift and a roadmap to ensure the ethical application of ChatGPT-like models in education and beyond.