The DOI matches its Crossref record; 105 of the 105 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 1 of the 91 sources its claims cite were checked for support.
Can Generative AI improve social science?
Open accessAbstract
Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online experiments, automated content analyses, agent-based models, and other techniques commonly used to study human behavior. In the second section of this article, I discuss the many limitations of Generative AI. I examine how bias in the data used to train these tools can negatively impact social science research—as well as a range of other challenges related to ethics, replication, environmental impact, and the proliferation of low-quality research. I conclude by arguing that social scientists can address many of these limitations by creating open-source infrastructure for research on human behavior. Such infrastructure is not only necessary to ensure broad access to high-quality research tools, I argue, but also because the progress of AI will require deeper understanding of the social forces that guide human behavior.
Overview
AI snapshot
Written from the paper’s full text.
TL;DR
This perspective argues that generative AI can improve social science by advancing survey research, online experiments, automated content analysis, and agent-based modeling, while also posing serious bias, ethics, replication, environmental, and “junk science” risks. It concludes that social scientists should build open-source infrastructure to govern, study, and shape these tools.
Key findings
- Generative AI can impersonate humans in some research settings: GPT-2 produced foreign-policy statements judged as credible as human-written ones, humans were largely unable to distinguish LLM- from human-authored texts, and GPT-3 could generate COVID-19 misinformation that escaped detection by most social media platforms.
- LLMs show promise for reproducing experiments and coding text: Ashokkumar et al. found a correlation of 0.86 between treatment effects in 482 studies and GPT-4 responses, and Mellon et al. found LLM classifications matched highly trained coders roughly 95% of the time.
- Simulation research is expanding: Park et al. used several dozen GPT-3.5-turbo agents in a small-town simulacrum that developed routines and emergent group behavior; Törnberg et al. simulated a social media platform with 500 agents calibrated using American National Election Study data; Allamong et al. had respondents interact with LLM impersonators for ten minutes, with most participants uncertain whether they interacted with humans or bots.
- The paper identifies major risks: LLM bias against groups such as those over 65, widowed, or Mormon; difficulty replicating probabilistic outputs; prompt sensitivity and model drift; ethical/privacy concerns; and environmental costs, citing a 2019 study that training a single LLM may generate as much CO₂ as the lifetime emissions of five automobiles.
Methods
- Design: conceptual/perspective article, not an empirical study; the author synthesizes recent research and proposes an agenda for social science use of generative AI.
- Data or sample: no original data; the argument draws on cited studies, including published papers and preprints, across surveys, online experiments, text analysis, and agent-based modeling.
- Main analysis: narrative synthesis and conceptual argument; no systematic search strategy, meta-analysis, or new quantitative analysis is described.
Limitations
- Author-stated: the analysis is limited to social science, focuses on scientific research rather than broader social life, may become outdated quickly, does not provide a technical discussion of how generative AI models work, and many cited studies are preprints that have not undergone rigorous peer review and may fail to replicate.
- Evident from the text: as a perspective/review, the selection of studies is illustrative rather than systematic, with no formal inclusion criteria or quantitative synthesis; conclusions depend heavily on rapidly evolving models and preprints.
- Evident from the text: the paper notes unresolved replication problems, including probabilistic outputs, lack of standards for temperature parameters, prompt sensitivity, model drift over time, and substantial differences across models.
Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.
Integrity signals
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Claims the paper makes
68 Not checked yet · 52 Own interpretation · 9 No basis given · 1 Supported
Every source the paper cites for this claim was checked and supports it.
In the paper
“LLMs also appear to have distinctive personality characteristics—specifically, they are more likely to be extroverted and agreeable than neurotic (62).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
What the sources say
- Supportedcites [62] M. Pellert, C. Lechner, C. Wagner, B. Rammstedt, M. Strohmaier, AI psychometrics: Assessing the psychological profiles of large language models through psychometric inventories. Perspect. Psychol. Sci., 10.1177/17456916231214460 (2024). PMC11373167 38165766 source
In “Demonstrations of AI Psychometrics > Assessing personality” (page unavailable), the paper reports that the six English-language models scored high on agreeableness and extraversion and low on neuroticism. It describes the models’ Big Five profiles overall in the same terms, supporting the citing sentence’s hedged paraphrase. (LLM, conf=0.91)
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Supported
In the paper
“They show humans are largely unable to determine whether such texts are authored by humans or LLMs in a series of experiments.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [5] M. Jakesch, J. T. Hancock, M. Naaman, Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2208839120 (2023). 36881628 PMC10089155 source
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Though silicon samples will not soon displace survey research with human respondents, they may still be very useful for pretesting surveys before they are dispatched (at considerable cost) to large groups of human respondents, or imputing missing data (11, 17).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
hedged- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Finally, Zhou et al. show that GPT-3 can easily produce misinformation about COVID-19 that can escape detection by most social media platforms (8).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [8] J. Zhou, Y. Zhang, Q. Luo, A. Parker, M. Choudhury, “Synthetic lies: Understanding AI-generated misinformation and evaluating algorithmic and human solutions” in CHI ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, 2023). source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Studies also indicate LLMs represent some demographic subgroups more accurately than others (13, 15).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [13] J. Bisbee, J. Clinton, C. Dorff, B. Kenkel, J. Larson, Synthetic replacements for human survey data? the perils of large language models. socArXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.31235/osf.io/5ecfa (Accessed 20 December 2023). source
- Not checked yetcites [15] S. Santurkar et al., Whose opinions do language models reflect? arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2303.17548 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
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In the paper
“For example, Argyle et al. indicate GPT-3 can accurately impersonate respondents to a nationally representative public opinion survey from a range of different demographic backgrounds (11).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [11] L. P. Argyle, Out of one, many: Using language models to simulate human samples. Polit. Anal. 31, 337– 351 (2023). source
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“More recent studies indicate AI-generated content can influence human attitudes, even if it is false or misleading (9, 10).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [9] L. D. Griffin et al., Susceptibility to influence of large language models. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2303.06074 (Accessed 20 December 2023). source
- Not matchedcites [10] E. Karinshak, S. X. Liu, J. S. Park, J. T. Hancock, Working with AI to persuade. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, 116:1– 116:29 (2023).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Similarly, Yang and Menczer argue GPT-3.5 can accurately code the credibility of media sources (50).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [50] K. C. Yang, F. Menczer, Large language models can rate news outlet credibility. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2304.00228 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Though this study created a relatively simplistic social environment with a small number of agents, it provides a proof of concept that Generative AI has the potential to advance social simulation research.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Another study indicates LLMs can reproduce social movement dynamics on social media (41).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [41] X. Mou, Z. Wei, X. Huang, Unveiling the truth and facilitating change: Towards agent-based large-scale social movement simulation. arXiv [Preprint] (2024). 10.48550/arXiv.2402.16333 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Probably not a substantial claim. 47
- It may state two separate claims as one. 51
- The quote only partly states this claim. 2
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Generative AI may be useful for creating such vignettes and/or images—especially with iterative feedback from researchers—to increase the external validity and comparability of those primes, or to protect the privacy of real humans whose images might be used in such studies.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“Horton, for example, argues synthetic research respondents created using GPT-3 can be used to reproduce several classic studies in behavioral economics (19).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [19] J. J. Horton, Large language models as simulated economic agents: What can we learn from homo silicus? arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2301.07543 (Accessed 20 December 2023). source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
In the paper
“At the same time, more recent research indicates GPT 3.5 turbo produces accurate mean estimates of attitudes within a population, but understates variances—exaggerating extreme attitudes (13).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [13] J. Bisbee, J. Clinton, C. Dorff, B. Kenkel, J. Larson, Synthetic replacements for human survey data? the perils of large language models. socArXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.31235/osf.io/5ecfa (Accessed 20 December 2023). source
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online experiments, automated content analyses, agent-based models, and other techniques commonly used to study human behavior.”
- Also stated in: § Abstract · hedged
“In this article, I argue these tools may advance the scale, scope, and speed of social science research—and may enable new forms of scientific inquiry as well.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one. The quote only partly states this claim.
- Also stated in: § Abstract · hedged
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Though silicon samples will not soon displace survey research with human respondents, they may still be very useful for pretesting surveys before they are dispatched (at considerable cost) to large groups of human respondents, or imputing missing data (11, 17).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [11] L. P. Argyle, Out of one, many: Using language models to simulate human samples. Polit. Anal. 31, 337– 351 (2023). source
- Not checked yetcites [17] J. Kim, B. Lee, AI-augmented surveys: Leveraging large language models for opinion prediction in nationally representative surveys. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2305.09620 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“Similarly, Aher et al. show that GPT-3 can also reproduce classic social psychology experiments—including the infamous Milgram experiment—though they argue it cannot reproduce the “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon (20).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [20] G. Aher, R. I. Arriaga, A. T. Kalai, Using large language models to simulate multiple humans and replicate human subject studies. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2208.10264 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Still other studies indicate LLMs can replicate classic experiments in cognitive science and the study of morality and replicate human behavior in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and other behavioral games (21–24).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [21] M. Binz, E. Schulz, Using cognitive psychology to understand GPT-3. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2218523120 (2023). 36730192 PMC9963545 source
- Not checked yetcites [22] D. Dillion, N. Tandon, Y. Gu, K. Gray, Can AI language models replace human participants? Trends Cognit. Sci. 27, 597– 600 (2023). 37173156 source
- Not checked yetcites [23] Q. Mei, Y. Xie, W. Yuan, M. O. Jackson, A turing test of whether AI chatbots are behaviorally similar to humans. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121, e2313925121 (2024). 38386710 PMC10907317 source
- Not checked yetcites [24] C. Xie et al., Can large language model agents simulate human trust behaviors? arXiv [Preprint] (2024). 10.48550/arXiv.2402.04559 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“They found GPT-2 could successfully impersonate humans, and can even write lengthy news stories about international affairs that are judged to be as credible as those authored by real journalists.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [7] S. Kreps, R. M. McCain, M. Brundage, All the news that’s fit to fabricate: AI-generated text as a tool of media misinformation. J. Exp. Polit. Sci. 9, 104– 117 (2022). source
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Another study indicates LLMs exhibit an affirmative bias in yes/no questions (14).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [14] V. Dentella, F. Günther, E. Leivada, Systematic testing of three language models. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2309583120 (2023). 38091290 PMC10743380 source
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Such infrastructure is not only necessary to ensure broad access to high-quality research tools, I argue, but also because the progress of AI will require deeper understanding of the social forces that guide human behavior.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“I examine how bias in the data used to train these tools can negatively impact social science research—as well as a range of other challenges related to ethics, replication, environmental impact, and the proliferation of low-quality research.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Such infrastructure is not only necessary to ensure broad access to high-quality research tools, I argue, but also because the progress of AI will require deeper understanding of the social forces that guide human behavior.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“I conclude by arguing that social scientists can address many of these limitations by creating open-source infrastructure for research on human behavior.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
In the paper
“Overall, they find LLMs perform well—particularly in coding data created by political scientists and sociologists. Unsurprisingly, they find the latest models perform best. LLMs appear to assign more accurate codes for some topics than others, however, which may be an artifact of the way they were trained.”
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?. · plain
“That such models can reproduce coding decisions of humans without any specific training is encouraging, but Ziems et al. argue usage of LLMs will still require some degree of human supervision, and familiarity with task-specific prompt-engineering.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [54] C. Ziems et al., Can large language models transform computational social science? arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2305.03514 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may state two separate claims as one.
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?. · plain
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“If such issues can be addressed, integrating LLMs and ABMs could open new lines of inquiry. This approach could be employed to study topics that are very difficult to examine in real life (such as violent extremism on social media), or to study populations that are very difficult to access (e.g., violent extremists) (12).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. It may state two separate claims as one. The quote only partly states this claim.
In the paper
“Park et al. created a simulacrum where several dozen agents—independently powered by multiple instances of GPT 3.5-turbo—interacted with each other in a fictitious small-town setting (6).”
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?. · boosted
“These agents not only developed daily routines as the simulation progressed (e.g., waking up and eating breakfast), but also demonstrated emergent group properties.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [6] J. S. Park et al., Generative agents: Interactive simulacra of human behavior. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2304.03442 (Accessed 20 December 2023). source
boosted- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?. · boosted
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The capacity of Generative AI to impersonate humans may thus improve as model size increases, and as researchers experiment with prompting LLMs with even richer forms of data such as in-depth qualitative interviews or detailed life histories.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“Gilardi et al. argue GPT 3.5-turbo can accurately measure the topic of tweets, the stance or opinions of their authors, and the “frames” used to organize the message in a narrative manner (51).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [51] F. Gilardi, M. Alizadeh, M. Kubli, ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2305016120 (2023). 37463210 PMC10372638 source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“Conversely, Traeger et al. find automated agents that are trained to perform poorly at collaborative tasks can actually improve the behavior of human team members (29).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [29] M. L. Traeger, S. Strohkorb Sebo, M. Jung, B. Scassellati, N. A. Christakis, Vulnerable robots positively shape human conversational dynamics in a human–robot team. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 6370– 6375 (2020). 32152118 PMC7104178 source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
In the paper
“They find this model performs better than human workers trained with such materials on Amazon Mechanical Turk—though such coders are known to be less accurate than those trained directly by researchers in small group settings.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [51] F. Gilardi, M. Alizadeh, M. Kubli, ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2305016120 (2023). 37463210 PMC10372638 source
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Yet some recent studies indicate LLMs can recreate competitive dynamics within simulated economic and labor markets (42, 43), the diffusion of information and decision-making within organizations, and crisis response (41, 44, 45).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [41] X. Mou, Z. Wei, X. Huang, Unveiling the truth and facilitating change: Towards agent-based large-scale social movement simulation. arXiv [Preprint] (2024). 10.48550/arXiv.2402.16333 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
- Not checked yetcites [44] N. Ghaffarzadegan, A. Majumdar, R. Williams, N. Hosseinichimeh, Generative agent-based modeling: Unveiling social system dynamics through coupling mechanistic models with generative artificial intelligence. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11456 (Accessed 19 December 2023).
- Not checked yetcites [45] B. Xiao, Z. Yin, Z. Shan, Simulating public administration crisis: A novel generative agent-based simulation system to lower technology barriers in social science research. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06957 (Accessed 19 December 2023).
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Whether Generative AI can successfully impersonate humans in more complex social settings such as interpersonal conversations is much less clear.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
In the paper
“Wu et al. demonstrate GPT-3.5 can produce accurate classifications of the ideology of U.S. elected officials by analyzing their public statements (49).”
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?. · plain
“The results closely approximate the popular DW-Nominate method for measuring the ideology of elected officials using roll-call voting, but also identified more nuance within moderates who often vote against the extreme wings of their parties.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [49] P. Y. Wu, J. Nagler, J. A. Tucker, S. Messing, Large language models can be used to scale the ideologies of politicians in a zero-shot learning setting. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2303.12057 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
boostedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?. · plain
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Most AI tools are trained using data created by humans, and frequently exhibit a broad range of prejudice and cognitive errors accordingly (1, 57–60).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
What the sources say
- Not matchedcites [1] K. Sayash, A. Narayanan, AI Snake Oil (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- Not matchedcites [57] R. Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, Cambridge, UK/Medford, MA, ed. 1, 2019).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- Not checked yetcites [58] S. Lazar, A. Nelson, AI safety on whose terms? Science 381, 138 (2023). 37440644 source
- Not checked yetcites [59] E. M. Bender, T. Gebru, A. McMillan-Major, S. Shmitchell, “On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, 2021), pp. 610–623. source
- Not matchedcites [60] K. Yee, U. Tantipongpipat, S. Mishra, Image Cropping on Twitter. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, 1– 24 (2021).36644216
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
- Not matched
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“That LLMs cannot yet match the accuracy of expert human coders means that they will not soon displace conventional text analysis.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“For example, Törnberg et al. create a simulated social media platform with five hundred agents whose behaviors are calibrated using data from the American National Election Study (ANES) (39).”
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?. · hedged
“This study both reproduces known dynamics on social media platforms and simulates what might happen if they used alternative newsfeed algorithms that optimize for consensus, instead of user engagement.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [39] P. Törnberg, D. Valeeva, J. Uitermark, C. Bail, Simulating social media using large language models to evaluate alternative news feed algorithms. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2310.05984 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
- Also stated in: § Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?. · hedged
In the paper
“The authors argue the introduction of the AI agent makes coordination more difficult for human players—and also creates less trust among members of the team.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [28] F. Dell’Acqua, B. Kogut, P. Perkowski, Super Mario Meets AI: Experimental effects of automation and skills on team performance and coordination (SSRN Scholarly Paper, 2020). source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Yet ABMs are often criticized for failing to capture the full spectrum of human behaviors (38). For example, conventional agents within ABMs do not use language, interpret social contexts, or engage in conversations with each other (39).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [38] R. Conte, M. Paolucci, On agent-based modeling and computational social science. Front. Psychol. 5, 668 (2014). 25071642 PMC4094840 source
- Not checked yetcites [39] P. Törnberg, D. Valeeva, J. Uitermark, C. Bail, Simulating social media using large language models to evaluate alternative news feed algorithms. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2310.05984 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“Similarly, Gao et al. use real-world social media data to calibrate a model they claim successfully predicts the spread of information and emotions about gender discrimination and nuclear energy (40).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [40] C. Gao et al., S3: Social-network simulation system with large language model-empowered agents. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14984 (Accessed 19 December 2023). source
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“At the same time integrating LLMs within ABMs may reinvigorate preexisting debates about the latter. Scholars often debate whether increasing the complexity of agents is desirable if emergent group dynamics of interest can be created with parsimonious models (33). It is likewise unclear how the performance of LLMs within ABMs should be evaluated.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“LLMs also appear capable of performing coding tasks in many of the world’s most prominent languages as well as other rudimentary tasks typically assigned to human research assistants such as data coding or data entry (as discussed in greater detail in SI Appendix) (56).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [56] A. Korinek, Language Models and Cognitive Automation for Economic Research (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023). source
hedged- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“They find most LLM’s responses are more liberal than the general population, and reflect those who are younger and have more education. LLMs are particularly unlikely to perform the responses of those over sixty-five years old, those who are widowed, or those who identify as Mormon.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [15] S. Santurkar et al., Whose opinions do language models reflect? arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2303.17548 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“If so, the probabilistic nature of LLMs may complicate scholars’ ability to reproduce each other’s findings, as I discuss in additional detail below.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Simulation-Based Research?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
In the paper
“Ashokkumar et al. find the correlation between treatment effects observed in 482 studies and responses created by GPT-4 is 0.86. Furthermore, they find this correlation holds for both published and unpublished studies, and across demographic subgroups (25).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [25] A. Ashokkumar, L. Hewitt, I. Ghezae, R. Willer, Prediction of social science experimental results using large language models (Working Paper, 2024).
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Multimodal models that can translate content from images into text suggest these coding capabilities may soon apply to other mediums as well.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“But LLMs may enable social scientists to examine corpora of unprecedented size with unforeseen speed. Rather than taking a random sample of documents, for example, social scientists now have the potential to code an entire corpus in short order.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Opportunities for Social Science with Generative AI > Can Generative AI Improve Text Analysis?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: unclear — It is unclear why the paper says it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“If bias in Generative AI tools can be carefully controlled—a major assumption—it could allow researchers to study its impact in empirical settings (for example, a survey respondent evaluating a hypothetical applicant for a job).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
- The authors state this as an assumption: Bias in Generative AI tools can be carefully controlled.
In the paper
“One proposal is to create an “accent” for LLMs—giving them a list of words they should use whenever possible—to allow people to retrospectively identify content that was not generated by humans (68).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Will Generative AI create “Junk Science”?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [68] J. Kirchenbauer et al., A watermark for large language models. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). 10.48550/arXiv.2301.10226 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“If a researcher uses GPT-4 to code a series of in-depth interviews about a sensitive topic such as intimate partner violence, the full-text of these interviews may be logged inside private corporations that are not beholden to the same standards for protecting human subjects as university researchers. Even worse, such data could potentially be sold to other corporations.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: unclear — It is unclear why the paper says it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Earlier I mentioned that researchers demonstrated that GPT-3 could perform the responses characteristic of participants in the infamous Milgram experiment.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
boosteddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
In the paper
“This question is particularly important since many Generative AI tools exhibit biases that are not only offensive (e.g., racism or misogyny), but may also hallucinate inaccurate information that could be shared by research participants on social media platforms, or elsewhere.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [69] L. Weidinger et al., “Taxonomy of risks posed by language models” in Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT’22) (Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, 2022), pp. 214–229. PMC10661580 37990734 source
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“While these questions may be less important for social scientists using Generative AI in a carefully supervised manner—for example, using DALL-E to generate a picture of a person that might be used in a survey experiment—they take on added importance in situations where human research participants might have conversations with a LLM in an unsupervised manner.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“One study, for example, suggests LLMs exhibit more rational behavior than humans (65).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [65] Y. Chen, T. X. Liu, Y. Shan, S. Zhong, The emergence of economic rationality of GPT. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120, e2316205120 (2023). 38085780 PMC10740389 source
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Though Generative AI may help researchers increase the external validity of their research designs, this may come at the cost of internal validity—or the capacity of different groups of researchers to reproduce or replicate each other’s results (2, 12).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Replicable?.
What the sources say
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Each entity that develops LLMs will not only have to agree to use watermarks, but they will also need to coordinate with each other.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Will Generative AI create “Junk Science”?.
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Some of these risks might be mitigated via content moderation filters that are currently available for some LLMs—and through rigorous testing of the prompts used to guide LLMs in research settings. Yet given the probabilistic nature of these models—and the ever-changing ways abuse and harassment can occur in online settings—such strategies will require great care.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Researchers who rely upon LLMs to perform literature reviews, generate new research questions, or summarize large corpora they are unable to read may face similar problems.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Will Generative AI create “Junk Science”?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Because LLMs are trained using retrospective data, they may be of limited utility in predicting ethical issues on the horizon, but they may nevertheless help researchers learn from each other’s mistakes.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Since the size of Generative AI models has grown considerably since 2019, social scientists must carefully reflect upon the presumably much larger environmental costs of developing such technologies—even if recent engineering advances have made training processes more efficient.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“It is further possible that Generative AI might be useful in “reverse engineering” some types of bias.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“On the other hand, studies that require humans to interact with each other also risk exposing research participants to offensive language, misinformation, or abuse.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
plainconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Lower values might produce more dependable results, but a researcher who employs LLMs to interact with humans in a field experiment may not want them to become overly repetitive.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Replicable?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Most LLMs also produce different results over time. This is because many of them are constantly being fine-tuned to make them more effective or create new safeguards against bias or illicit behavior.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Replicable?.
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Milgram showed that many respondents were willing to do so out of deference to authority, but the study was widely criticized for creating trauma among participants.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“The potential for malicious actors to use Generative AI to spread misinformation in the short term is very concerning because tools such as LLMs are so adept at impersonating humans at scale (67).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Will Generative AI create “Junk Science”?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [67] S. Feuerriegel, Research can help to tackle AI-generated disinformation. Nat. Hum. Behav. 7, 1818– 1821 (2023). 37985906 source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Large companies might be encouraged to do this through government regulation. But such coordination would be unable to detect LLMs created by individuals skilled enough to develop smaller models on their own.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Will Generative AI create “Junk Science”?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Journals and funding agencies may find themselves overwhelmed by low-quality “junk-science” created by LLMs.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Will Generative AI create “Junk Science”?.
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
In the paper
“One study, for example, suggests the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans (71).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Ethical?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [71] B. Tomlinson, R. W. Black, D. J. Patterson, A. W. Torrance, The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans. Sci. Rep. 14, 3732 (2024). PMC10867074 38355820 source
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
In the paper
“Though such guard-rails probably improve the safety of Generative AI tools for public use, they may impede the ability of social scientists to leverage bias for research purposes (12).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Generative AI Exhibits Human Biases.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [12] I. Grossmann, AI and the transformation of social science research. Science 380, 1108– 1109 (2023). 37319216 source
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“The tendency for LLMs to produce heterogeneous results can be partly controlled via “temperature” parameters that regulate the predictability of model output. At present, however, there are no standards for what values of this parameter are appropriate (72).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Limitations and Possible Dangers > Is Research with Generative AI Replicable?.
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [72] M. Alizadeh et al., Open-source large language models outperform crowd workers and approach ChatGPT in text-annotation tasks. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02179 (Accessed 19 December 2023).
plainconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“In addition to being free to use, most open-source models provide more transparency than their proprietary counterparts. This not only allows researchers to better understand the processes used to train and fine-tune Generative AI, but it could also allow them to control such processes altogether.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: unclear — It is unclear why the paper says it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
- Rests on an assumption: Most open-source models provide more transparency than proprietary counterparts.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Social scientists could build similar models to better control when and how models become biased—especially in research settings where the values built into models by large corporations may inhibit research.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The Academic Developer Program at Twitter that I helped create once allowed social scientists to collect vast amount of data. Access to much smaller amounts of data is now prohibitively expensive for most researchers.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“These models are well documented and released alongside scientific papers that can help social scientists evaluate their potential.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“One study indicates open-source models perform better than crowd-workers at annotating news articles and tweets—even though they perform slightly less well than ChatGPT on these tasks (72).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [72] M. Alizadeh et al., Open-source large language models outperform crowd workers and approach ChatGPT in text-annotation tasks. arXiv [Preprint] (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02179 (Accessed 19 December 2023).
hedged- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“As the sections above describe, Generative AI has many limitations for social science research—most of which we are only beginning to understand.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Accomplishing this agenda will require deeper understanding of how Generative AI tools are built and fine-tuned.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Meta has even released detailed information about the inner workings of the model such as the numeric weights its uses to respond to prompts. This enables researchers to better control the fine-tuning process, and study how LLMs work.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: unclear — It is unclear why the paper says it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Transparent, public discussion about Generative AI may also help researchers evaluate some of the other risks above—such as the dissemination of misinformation.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“This will require a much more sophisticated understanding of how the behavior of individual agents is constrained by social networks, institutions, organizations, and other extra-individual factors that are cornerstones of the science of human behavior.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Conclusion
plainconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“If the capabilities of these tools continue to expand at a fraction of their current pace, Generative AI may become a fixture within the social scientist’s toolkit much sooner than many researchers realize.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Conclusion
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Some newer models created by Mistral even offer model weights that are “raw,” or not fine-tuned.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“If such an organization could be realized, however, it would not only improve access to state-of-the-art technology among a broad group of scholars, but also improve our capacity to build disciplinary standards of open science and ethics into research with Generative AI.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: fails — The paper may give no reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“There is no guarantee that Meta will suddenly restrict access to its Generative AI tools, or begin charging researchers to access it like their peers. Though researchers at wealthy institutions may be able to afford such fees, many others may not—reproducing inequality within the academic caste system (76).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [76] A. Clauset, S. Arbesman, D. B. Larremore, Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks. Sci. Adv. 1, e1400005 (2015). 26601125 PMC4644075 source
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Yet multiple groups of leading scholars and policy experts argue such risks are marginal when compared to information that is already readily available on the internet (78, 79).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [78] R. Bommasani, Considerations for Governing Open Foundation Models. Issue Brief Human, Stanford HAI (Elsevier, 2023).
- Not checked yetcites [79] S. Kapoor et al., On the societal impact of open foundation models. arXiv [Preprint] (2024). 10.48550/arXiv.2403.07918 (Accessed 20 December 2023).
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
In the paper
“In the early 2010s, many companies shared generous amounts of data with researchers. This enabled entirely new forms of scholarly research, and social scientists and researchers inside industry frequently collaborated with each other and presented their work at conferences. In more recent years, data-sharing practices at most large social media companies have been discontinued (77).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [77] D. Freelon, Computational research in the post-API age. Polit. Commun. 35, 1– 4 (2018). source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
The paper states this without a source or data behind it here, so there is nothing to check it against. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“For the time being, both Meta and Google have made two of their models available to the public: Llama and Gemma.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Creating Open-Source Infrastructure for Social Science Research
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
The authors state this as an assumption.
Bias in Generative AI tools can be carefully controlled.
“If bias in Generative AI tools can be carefully controlled—a major assumption—it could allow researchers to study its impact in empirical settings (for example, a survey respondent evaluating a hypothetical applicant for a job).”
The paper relies on this without support.
The processes used to train the most popular Generative AI models, such as GPT-4, are largely unknown.
“This is no easy task when the processes used to train the most popular Generative AI models—such as GPT-4—are largely unknown.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Many populations that are difficult to study may not be well represented in the training data used to create Generative AI.
“Far more research is needed to determine whether LLM-based simulations are realistic enough to be useful in such endeavors—especially since many populations that are difficult to study may not be well represented in the training data used to create Generative AI.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Many of the studies discussed in the article are preprints that have not yet been peer-reviewed, much less replicated.
“As I mentioned at the outset of this article, many of the studies discussed above are preprints that have not yet been peer-reviewed, much less replicated.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Best practices for sensitivity analyses of prompt variations have not yet been identified in social science or any other field.
“But best practices for such sensitivity analyses have not yet been identified in social science—or any other field—to my knowledge.”
The paper relies on this without support.
OpenAI has not disclosed basic information about GPT-4, such as its size or number of parameters.
“Indeed, OpenAI has not even disclosed even the most basic information about GPT-4—such as its size, or number of parameters.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Meta recently stopped providing information about datasets used to train Llama and does not provide licenses without restriction.
“Yet Meta recently stopped providing information about the datasets used to train Llama, and does not provide licenses without restriction, as is customary with open-source software.”
The paper relies on this without support.
The quality and performance of open-source Generative AI tools has increased markedly in recent months.
“Another reason for social scientists to consider building their own infrastructure is that the quality and performance of open-source Generative AI tools has increased markedly in recent months.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Llama 3 and R Command + and other freely available models are beginning to approach the performance of proprietary models in many areas.
“Though benchmarks for evaluating the performance of LLMs are hotly debated, it is noteworthy that Llama 3 and R Command + and other freely available models are beginning to approach the performance of proprietary models in many areas.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Most open-source models provide more transparency than proprietary counterparts.
“In addition to being free to use, most open-source models provide more transparency than their proprietary counterparts.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Open-source models often create and sustain a community of people with shared concerns.
“Open-source models also often create and sustain a community of people with shared concerns.”
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?
In the citing paper
“Researchers have also recently noted GPT’s ability to help with computational social science tasks (49–54), detect misinformation (55), infer politicians’ ideologies (56), write persuasive political arguments (57), respond to patient questions (58), simulate human research participants (59–61), and model collective behavior (56).”
From GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis (2024) · cites this paper as [54]
In the citing paper
“This means that even when updates address and mitigate detected biases, they also introduce the potential for “process reproducibility failure” (98) in the generated data and impede reproducibility, critical for scientific rigor (15, 100, 101).”
From Perils and opportunities in using large language models in psychological research (2024) · cites this paper as [15]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.
Rated minor: it would not touch a result — a value no result rests on, a p-value that stays on the same side of the significance level, or a conflict that is clerical, resolved elsewhere in the paper, or outside its own findings.
In the paper
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > References
“X. Mou, Z. Wei, X. Huang, Unveiling the truth and facilitating change: Towards agent-based large-scale social movement simulation. arXiv [Preprint] (2024).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > References
“10.48550/arXiv.2402.16333 (Accessed 20 December 2023).”
Rated minor: it would not touch a result — a value no result rests on, a p-value that stays on the same side of the significance level, or a conflict that is clerical, resolved elsewhere in the paper, or outside its own findings.
In the paper
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
“In the second section of this article, I discuss the many limitations of Generative AI.”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > Abstract
“In the third section of this article, I turn to the various limitations and potential dangers associated with Generative AI.”
Rated minor: it would not touch a result — a value no result rests on, a p-value that stays on the same side of the significance level, or a conflict that is clerical, resolved elsewhere in the paper, or outside its own findings.
In the paper
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > References
“S. Kapoor et al., On the societal impact of open foundation models. arXiv [Preprint] (2024).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > References
“10.48550/arXiv.2403.07918 (Accessed 20 December 2023).”
Rated minor: it would not touch a result — a value no result rests on, a p-value that stays on the same side of the significance level, or a conflict that is clerical, resolved elsewhere in the paper, or outside its own findings.
In the paper
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > References
“C. Xie et al., Can large language model agents simulate human trust behaviors? arXiv [Preprint] (2024).”
§ Can Generative AI improve social science? > References
“10.48550/arXiv.2402.04559 (Accessed 20 December 2023).”
Citations
Cites
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Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations
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On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
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On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
A survey on large language model based autonomous agents
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Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?
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GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis
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Human-AI agency in the age of generative AI
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Metadata
- Authors
- Bail, C. A.
- Affiliations
- Duke University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bail, Christopher A.
- ORCID
- Bail, Christopher A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2024-05-09
- Volume
- 121
- Issue
- 21
- Pages
- e2314021121-e2314021121
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC11127003
- OpenAlex
- W4396781199
- Semantic Scholar
- 9e0e253a7f71f6702f40b083080232989c482464
- Cited by
- 369
- References
- 90
- Citations by year
- 2026: 143 · 2025: 160 · 2024: 55
- FWCI
- 148.38
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nd)
- SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- John F. Templeton Foundation (62656)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence Applications
- Keywords
- generative AI, social science research, survey research, online experiments, computational text analysis, agent-based modeling, training data bias, research ethics, replication, environmental impact of AI, human behavior
- MeSH terms
- Artificial Intelligence, Humans, Social Sciences
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).
Cited sources are checked with a language model’s help (gpt-6-sol).
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 ›
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