“ChatGPT says no”: agency, trust, and blame in Twitter discourses after the launch of ChatGPT

ChatGPT, a chatbot using the GPT-n series large language model, has surged in popularity by providing conversation, assistance, and entertainment. This has raised questions about its agency and resulting implications on trust and blame, particularly when concerning its portrayal on social media platforms like Twitter. Understanding trust and blame is crucial for gauging public perception, reliance on, and adoption of AI-driven tools like ChatGPT. To explore ChatGPT’s perceived status as an algorithmic social actor and uncover implications for trust and blame through agency and transitivity, we examined 88,058 tweets about ChatGPT, published in a ‘hype period’ between November 2022 and March 2023, using Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, underpinned by Social Actor Representation. Notably, ChatGPT was presented in tweets as a social actor on 87