Portraying AI’s Impact on Jobs: A Topic and Sentiment Analysis of U.S. Mainstream Media Discourses (2023–2025)

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, has intensified public concerns about job displacement and labor market disruption. This study examines how U.S. mainstream newspapers represented AI’s employment implications between January 2023 and March 2025. Using a mixed-methods approach that integrates topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and corpus-based discourse analysis, it analyzes 311 articles from five major U.S. newspapers. The results show that both media focus and public perceptions shifted notably in response to socio-political and labor-related events linked to AI. Overall, positive sentiment outweighed negative sentiment, indicating a predominantly optimistic media tone regarding AI’s impact on jobs. This study contributes to the research on AI-mediated public discourse by providing a replicable analytical framework and underscoring the significance of media narratives in shaping public attitudes and employment policy debates.