As artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasing role in society, educators face growing pressure to incorporate AI-driven tools into their classrooms. While these tools promise to enhance teaching and learning, their true effectiveness is best understood through the perspectives of the educators who use them. This study examines educators' attitudes toward AI by analyzing discussions in two popular Reddit communities: r/Teachers and r/Professors. We begin by analyzing the overall sentiment of 420 AI-related posts and their respective first-level comments using the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER). Notably, from January 2023 (shortly after ChatGPT became mainstream) to March 2025, we observe opposite trends in sentiment: a decline in positive sentiment for r/Teachers (from 84% to 71%) and an increase for r/Professors (from 62% to 82%). To better understand educators’ attitudes, we apply BERTopic to posts and comments to identify key themes within AI-related discussions across both communities, resulting in six shared themes. We then conduct sentiment analysis on the representative posts and comments associated with each theme to examine educators’ attitudes in these areas more deeply. Our findings suggest that while educators generally express positive attitudes toward AI across the identified themes, there is notable variability in sentiment within two specific areas: communication and neurodiversity. By identifying these areas of variable attitudes, this study provides a starting point for future research aimed at understanding the challenges and barriers educators currently face in adopting AI. These insights can inform the design of more effective AI adoption strategies in education.

Keywords: AI in education, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, reddit discourse.