On the last day of November 2022, OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot, powered by an artificial intelligence language model that wowed the world. Since then, the social media conversation about AI has skyrocketed. The Observatory of Social Conversation in Spain of LLYC and La Vanguardia, which analyzes the hottest issues in the public sphere, has studied 18 months on Twitter, from January 2022 to June 2023, on 1.75 million messages. From ChatGPT, 1.15 million messages have been published, 65.4% of the global conversation, with a growth of 231.1%.
“Unlike other studies, what we see in this one is a lower political presence. It is an issue that is not yet politicized”, points out Ibo Sanz, senior director of deep digital business strategy in Europe at LLYC. “It’s a very professional conversation,” he observes, “in which most of it comes from different professions, from arts and design to programming, who are capitalizing on the conversation.”
This low politicization contrasts with other reports that attract a lot of social attention, such as the one on health, in which the politicized communities, progressive and conservative, reach a volume of 73% of the profiles, while for AI none of them reaches 5%. The largest group is that of general society, with 11%.
One of the interesting insights from the report is that data savvy and technology professionals are leading the conversation around AI, an issue with numerous implications that require solid insights. The community in which AI is most rejected is that of illustrators, artists and professionals in the audiovisual sector, who express negative feelings, criticizing the limits on its use and the risk of replacing human creations.
On artificial intelligence, the report by LLYC and La Vanguardia stands out, almost a third of the topics covered (32.6%) are AI applications, generative AI and the future of this technology. In Spain, the social conversation about AI tends to be neutral, with 80.3% of the messages, although the negative sentiment, with 14%, is much higher than the positive one, with 5.7%, which indicates the presence of misgivings about aspects of this technology such as security, regulation, work and generative AI.
The report detects that in Spain 30% of the conversation about AI is given in English, and corresponds to professionals of this technology. Among data experts, programmers, illustrators, artists and digital leaders, 68% of interventions are in English. It so happens that, although the issues that arouse misgivings about AI, such as security and work, are the same in Spanish and English, in the latter there is a greater degree of positivity. Data experts and programmers account for 22.34% of the conversation on ChatGPT. Those of marketing and sales, 11.55%.
