Papers › ChatGPT as a commenter to the news: can LLMs generate human-like opinions?

ChatGPT as a commenter to the news: can LLMs generate human-like opinions?

21 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.13961archive 2025-07-28

Rayden Tseng, Suzan Verberne, Peter van der Putten

ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, and other large language models (LLMs) have drawn significant attention since their release, and the abilities of these models have been investigated for a wide variety of tasks. In this research we investigate to what extent GPT-3.5 can generate human-like comments on Dutch news articles. We define human likeness as `not distinguishable from human comments', approximated by the difficulty of automatic classification between human and GPT comments. We analyze human likeness across multiple prompting techniques. In particular, we utilize zero-shot, few-shot and context prompts, for two generated personas. We found that our fine-tuned BERT models can easily distinguish human-written comments from GPT-3.5 generated comments, with none of the used prompting methods performing noticeably better. We further analyzed that human comments consistently showed higher lexical diversity than GPT-generated comments. This indicates that although generative LLMs can generate fluent text, their capability to create human-like opinionated comments is still limited.

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPTGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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