Fear of Artificial Intelligence? NLP, ML and LLMs based discovery of AI-phobia and fear sentiment propagation by AI news

Confusion, fear and mixed sentiments prevail in the minds of people towards what is arguably oneof the most important of dynamics of modern human society: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Thisstudy aims to explore the contributions of news media towards this phenomenon - we analyzenearly seventy thousand recent news headlines on AI, using natural language processing (NLP)informatics methods, machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs) to draw insightsand discover dominant themes. Our theoretical framework was derived from extant literaturewhich posits the power of fear producing articles and news headlines which produce significantimpacts on public behavior even when available in small quantities. We applied extensive textualinformatics methods using word and phrase frequency analytics, sentiment analysis and humanexperts based thematic analysis to discover insights on AI phobia inducing news headlines.Our rigorous analysis of nearly seventy thousand headlines using multiple validation methods inNLP (exploratory informatics including BERT, Llama 2 and Mistral(1; 2) based topic identification),ML (supervised informatics) and LLMs (neural nets for sentiment classification, with BERT, Llama2 and Mistral) demonstrates the presence of an unreasonable level of emotional negativity and fearinducing verbiage in AI news headlines. The framing of AI as being dangerous or as being anexistential threat to humanity can have a profound impact on public perception, and the resultingAI phobia and confusion in public perceptions are inherently detrimental to the science of AI.Furthermore, this can also impact AI policy and regulations, and harm society. We conclude with adiscussion deducing implications for society and make recommendations for education and policiesthat could support human identity and dignity.