Mapping AI Ethics Narratives: Evidence from Twitter Discourse Between 2015 and 2022

Abstract: Public participation is indispensable for an insightful understanding of the ethics issues raised by AI technologies. Twitter is selected in this paper to serve as an online public sphere for exploring discourse on AI ethics, facilitating broad and equitable public engagement in the development of AI technology. A research framework is proposed to demonstrate how to transform AI ethics-related discourse on Twitter into coherent and readable narratives. It consists of two parts: 1) combining neural networks with LLMs to construct a topic hierarchy that contains popular topics of public concern without ignoring small but important voices, thus allowing a fine-grained exploration of meaningful information. 2) transforming fragmented and difficult-to-understand social media information into coherent and easy-to-read stories through narrative visualization, providing a new perspective for understanding the information in Twitter data. This paper aims to advocate for policy makers to enhance public oversight of AI technologies so as to promote their fair and sustainable development.