Mapping ChatGPT in Mainstream Media: Early Quantitative Insights through Sentiment Analysis and Word Frequency Analysis

The exponential growth in user acquisition and popularity of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence(AI) powered chatbot, was accompanied by widespread mainstream media coverage. This article presents a quantitative data analysis of the early trends and sentiments revealed by conducting text mining and NLP methods onto a corpus of 10,902 mainstream news headlines related to the subject of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, from the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 to March 2023. The findings revealed in sentiment analysis, ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, were perceived more positively than negatively in the mainstream media. In regards to word frequency results, over sixty-five percent of the top frequency words were focused on Big Tech issues and actors while topics such as jobs, diversity, ethics, copyright, gender and women were poorly represented or completely absent and only accounted for six percent of the total corpus. This article is a critical analysis into the power structures and collusions between Big Tech and Big Media in their matrix of domination.