UROP Project

Public perceptions of the ethical footprint and civic responsibility in human-AI interaction

genAI usage, ethics, education, human-AI interaction, public perceptions

Research Mentor: Subhasree Sengupta,
Department, College, Affiliation: School of Information, Communication and Information
Contact Email: ss24da@fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor):
Research Assistant Supervisor Email:
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:

Looking for Research Assistants: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 2
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors

Project Location: On FSU Main Campus
Research Assistant Transportation Required:
Remote or In-person: Partially Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 8, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link:

• Day: Friday, September 5
  Start Time: 3:00
  End Time: 3:30
  Zoom Link: https://fsu.zoom.us/my/ssengupta249
• Day: Friday, September 5
  Start Time: 3:30
  End Time: 4:00
  Zoom Link: https://fsu.zoom.us/my/ssengupta249

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.

Research Tasks: 1.Exhaustive literature reviews to find relevant materials to scope keywords and frame the project
2.Web scraping using APIs and other web information parsing tools, primarily using Python (with some HTML and CSS knowledge)
3.Text analysis – using qualitative approaches drawing on grounded theory & computational mechanisms such as topic modeling
4. Creating survey instruments and developing a survey form using Qualtrics



Skills that research assistant(s) may need: Recommended
1. Familiarity with conducting literature reviews using FSU library resources, google scholar or an interest to learn
2. Some familiarity with python or an interest to learn
3. Familarity with Qualtrics or willingness to learn