Cited by 1,197Computational and Text Analysis MethodsTopic ModelingSentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 1 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks

Open access
Gilardi, Fabrizio, Alizadeh, Meysam, Kubli, Maël·2023·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Many NLP applications require manual text annotations for a variety of tasks, notably to train classifiers or evaluate the performance of unsupervised models. Depending on the size and degree of complexity, the tasks may be conducted by crowd workers on platforms such as MTurk as well as trained annotators, such as research assistants. Using four samples of tweets and news articles ( n = 6,183), we show that ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for several annotation tasks, including relevance, stance, topics, and frame detection. Across the four datasets, the zero-shot accuracy of ChatGPT exceeds that of crowd workers by about 25 percentage points on average, while ChatGPT’s intercoder agreement exceeds that of both crowd workers and trained annotators for all tasks. Moreover, the per-annotation cost of ChatGPT is less than $0.003—about thirty times cheaper than MTurk. These results demonstrate the potential of large language models to drastically increase the efficiency of text classification.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

Using four datasets of tweets and news articles (n = 6,183), the paper finds that zero-shot ChatGPT annotations outperform MTurk crowd workers on several text-annotation tasks and achieve higher intercoder agreement than both crowd workers and trained annotators. ChatGPT is also far cheaper, at less than $0.003 per annotation, about thirty times cheaper than MTurk.

Key findings

  • Across four datasets, ChatGPT’s zero-shot accuracy exceeds MTurk’s by about 25 percentage points on average, and it outperforms MTurk for most tasks.
  • ChatGPT’s intercoder agreement averages 91% at temperature = 1 and 97% at temperature = 0.2, compared with about 56% for MTurk and 79% for trained annotators.
  • Relevance-task accuracy rates were 70% for content moderation tweets, 81% for content moderation news articles, 83% for US Congress tweets, and 59% for 2023 content moderation tweets.
  • Per-annotation cost for ChatGPT is less than $0.003, about thirty times cheaper than MTurk. Correlations reported: intercoder agreement and accuracy r = 0.36; ChatGPT accuracy and trained-annotator intercoder agreement r = 0.46; ChatGPT overperformance vs. MTurk and trained-annotator intercoder agreement r = −0.37.

Methods

  • Design: compare zero-shot ChatGPT annotations against MTurk crowd workers and trained annotators on the same codebooks and tasks, using trained annotators as the gold standard.
  • Data: four datasets totaling n = 6,183, including a random sample of 2,382 content-moderation tweets from 2020–2021; 1,856 US Congress tweets from 2017–2022; 1,606 newspaper articles on content moderation from 2020–2021; and 500 tweets from January 2023, of which 339 were in English.
  • Analysis: tasks included relevance, topic detection, stance, general frame detection, and policy frame detection. ChatGPT used the “gpt-3.5-turbo” API with temperature 1 and 0.2, two responses per temperature per tweet, and a new chat session for every tweet. MTurk workers were restricted to “MTurk Masters,” >90% HIT approval rate with at least 50 approved HITs, and US location. Metrics were accuracy against trained annotators and intercoder agreement.

Limitations

  • The paper states that further research is needed to understand how ChatGPT and other LLMs perform in a broader range of contexts, and it lists future questions including multiple languages, few-shot learning, semiautomated labeling, chain-of-thought prompting, and comparison across LLM types.
  • The paper states that in the 2023 sample, ChatGPT struggled with misclassifying tweets about specific user suspensions in the relevance task due to a lack of examples in the prompt, underscoring the importance of high-quality prompts.
  • Evident from the text: the evaluation uses one ChatGPT model version (“gpt-3.5-turbo”) and does not report testing in languages other than English; the paper itself lists performance across multiple languages as a future question.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.2305016120

Cites

15 of 15 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Figures

Fig. 1. ChatGPT zero-shot text annotation performance in four datasets (A: tweets, 2020-2021; B: news articles, 2020-2021; C: tweets, 2023; D: tweets, 2017-2022), compared to MTurk and trained annotators. ChatGPT’s accuracy outperforms that of MTurk for most tasks. ChatGPT’s intercoder agreement outperforms that of both MTurk and trained annotators in all tasks. Accuracy means agreement with the trained annotators.
Fig. 1. ChatGPT zero-shot text annotation performance in four datasets (A: tweets, 2020-2021; B: news articles, 2020-2021; C: tweets, 2023; D: tweets, 2017-2022), compared to MTurk and trained annotators. ChatGPT’s accuracy outperforms that of MTurk for most tasks. ChatGPT’s intercoder agreement outperforms that of both MTurk and trained annotators in all tasks. Accuracy means agreement with the trained annotators.CC BY · PubMed Central

Verification

Claims the paper makes

10 Own result · 8 Own method · 7 Own interpretation · 2 No basis given · 1 Not checked yet

Verify all 1 references — free account

Show all 12 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 8
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 10
16 of 16
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The trained annotators' annotations constitute a valid gold standard for correctness.

    “using trained human annotations as our gold standard”
    “using our trained annotators as a benchmark”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The 2023 tweets were not included in ChatGPT's training data.

    “a new sample of tweets posted in 2023 to address the concern that ChatGPT might be relying on memorization for texts potentially included in the model’s training dataset.”
2 of 2

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 12 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. M. Desmond, E. Duesterwald, K. Brimijoin, M. Brachman, Q. Pan, Semi-automateddatalabeling, in NeurIPS 2020 Competition and Demonstration Track, (PMLR, 2021), pp. 156–169.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 501–600 of 1,025

Metadata

Authors
Gilardi, F., Alizadeh, M., & Kubli, M.
Affiliations
Harvard University (US)
Corresponding author
Gilardi, Fabrizio
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2023-07-18
Volume
120
Issue
30
Pages
e2305016120-e2305016120
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W4384662964
Cited by
1,197
References
12
Citations by year
2026: 440 · 2025: 356 · 2024: 274 · 2023: 125
FWCI
554.15
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich)
Funders
EC | European Research Council (883121)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Keywords
ChatGPT, large language models, textual annotation, crowd workers, Amazon Mechanical Turk, automatic annotation, inter-coder agreement, annotation cost, stance detection, topic extraction, frame detection, tweets, news articles, text classification

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-09, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-09 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review