The purpose of this paper was to attempt to understand the public’s perception of artificial intelligence. They collected over a decades worth of data from Twitter in an attempt to understand the public opinion. What they discovered was that the perception of AI began to change at the end of 2014 due to experts. The change of this opinion, however, was not a result of deaths or accidents by AI but by experts joining the public space and arguing that AI could be a real threat to humanity. The basis of this opinion, however, came from counterfactuals scenarios which were then spread and amplified. The article goes into an analysis of the effect of these opinions and how different experts address their concerns with the public and the differing affect this has.
