sAIntimentor
I’ve been involved in AI Futures Lab, facilitated by Fathm. Together with about a dozen other specialists on using AI in the newsroom, I’ve been coaching a few newsrooms from around the globe, helping them think about possibilities for inclusion of AI in their workflows while, at least in my case, remaining critical of the promised riches and successes.
Later this year, I should work with another few from Latin America.
And, also, I’m set to host a few presentations on ICT architectures, in the light of leveraging AI solutions, in the newsroom.
A few weeks ago, Claude suffered a hiccup, and plenty of users complained about its degradation. This made me wonder whether it would be of interest to keep track of changed sentiments around specific AI frameworks, by analysing emotions evidenced in Reddit posts, in the subreddits of the more common AI providers.
Because Reddit blocked free API access a long time ago, this is a bit tricky, but, jumping through a few hoops, and with a few crafty tricks and turns, for the past two weeks, I’ve been monitoring 8 subreddits, including those on OpenAI, Claude, Grok, and others.
Seeing the results come in is interesting, and it’s fun to see sentimental shifts over time. However, the more surprising outcome is that it appears that accumulated sentiments don’t change much. That is to say, everyone, roughly, collectively, remains equally frustrated, confused, and angry, with these three being the most common sentiments encountered.
I’m leaning to not continue the monitoring, for now, but you can see last two-weeks results here.
Methodology
For the selected subreddits, all posts of a particular day are considered. Then, for each of these with sufficient amounts of texts as the main submission, sentiment analysis attempts to identify the dominant emotions in the text. Each post is assigned 100 ’emotion points’, which are divided amongst the identified emotions. One of the included emotions is ‘neutral’, so that each post can use up all its emotion points.
Then, for each subreddit, all scores of all emotions are counted up, and the total of each emotion is calculated as a percentage of the total of all emotions. And it’s these numbers that are plotted in the graphs.