UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1212

Overall Research Project Description As generative AI usage gradually augments various day-to-day tasks and activities, capturing public apprehension, sentiments and needs around ethical awareness, policies, and regulations becomes pivotal. Such insights can be fundamental to ensuring that the public is well-informed about the capacities and limitations of genAI and can help reduce overreliance and negligence when using genAI products. Online Question and answering forums such as Quora and Reddit have extensively served as powerful vessels catalyzing, empowering and championing community building, narrative agency and advocacy on matters of societal significance. Thus, the central goal of this study is to investigate the types of causes, concerns and discussions that emerge regarding genAI usage through a multi-platform, multi-method analysis; emphasizing on public viewpoints around ethics and associated implications of augmenting AI in various tasks and societal routines, can thereby pave the way to informing future educational efforts on gen AI literacy, policy and regulations as well as guidelines for judicious use and integration of genAI. Implementation-wise, the project will involve collecting and analyzing data from Quora and Reddit based on selected keywords analogous to the study's objectives. The text-based data will be analyzed using qualitative methods and state-of-the-art computational text analysis models. Social network and sentiment analysis will also add to the analytical frames and inferences drawn from the data. The goal will be to develop conference/journal publications for top information science, communication, education and related publication venues.