Seeing ChatGPT Through Students' Eyes: An Analysis of TikTok Data
This research addresses a gap in understanding student perspectives on ChatGPT for educators, though it is incremental as it applies existing analysis methods to new social media data.
The study analyzed 100 popular TikTok videos tagged with #chatgpt to understand how students use and perceive ChatGPT, finding that most videos promoted its use for tasks like writing essays or code and discussed ways to evade AI detectors, but lacked content on its limitations such as producing nonsensical or unfaithful output.
Advanced large language models like ChatGPT have gained considerable attention recently, including among students. However, while the debate on ChatGPT in academia is making waves, more understanding is needed among lecturers and teachers on how students use and perceive ChatGPT. To address this gap, we analyzed the content on ChatGPT available on TikTok in February 2023. TikTok is a rapidly growing social media platform popular among individuals under 30. Specifically, we analyzed the content of the 100 most popular videos in English tagged with #chatgpt, which collectively garnered over 250 million views. Most of the videos we studied promoted the use of ChatGPT for tasks like writing essays or code. In addition, many videos discussed AI detectors, with a focus on how other tools can help to transform ChatGPT output to fool these detectors. This also mirrors the discussion among educators on how to treat ChatGPT as lecturers and teachers in teaching and grading. What is, however, missing from the analyzed clips on TikTok are videos that discuss ChatGPT producing content that is nonsensical or unfaithful to the training data.