Public Perception of Humanoid AI Robots on YouTube: A Large-Scale Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis

Humanoid robots are increasingly visible in digital media environments, where online audiences encounter lifelike demonstrations of humanoid artificial intelligence (AI) systems long before interacting with them in everyday life. These encounters occur within platformized communication spaces such as YouTube, where user comments function as sites of public sense-making and affective reaction. This study analyzes 116,611 YouTube comments on highly viewed videos featuring humanoid AI robots to examine how publics discursively and emotionally construct meaning around these technological beings. Using BERTopic for bottom-up topic modeling and a transformer-based sentiment classifier (CardiffNLP RoBERTa) for sentiment detection, we identify seven emergent mega-topics: Reaction/Exclamations, Creepy/Uncanny, Jobs/Labor, Program/Control, Religion/God, Gender/Identity, and Robot General. Sentiment patterns systematically vary across frames. For example, awe-based reactions are predominantly positive, whereas uncanny and control-related frames skew negative with elevated neutrality. These findings highlight how early-phase discourse and affective climates around humanoid robots are discussed in large-scale online publics, offering implications for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) design, communication, and governance.