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ChatGPT, why can’t anyone afford a house? On the Effects of LLM pre-annotation on Annotator Subjectivity

Large language models (LLMs) have often been proposed as substitutes for human annotators in a variety of tasks. At the same time, there has been increased focus on the role that human subjectivity and perspective plays in data annotation. To avoid eliminating the human role in annotation entirely, the use of LLMs for pre-annotation has been suggested as an alternative approach. In this paper, we explore to which degree this approach affects subjectivity of social media annotation in English. We focus on comments regarding the current status of the housing market and label them for concern level, factors affecting housing affordability, and aspects that authors claim either exacerbate or improve the situation. To investigate this, we design an experiment involving two rounds of annotation: the first, a dataset annotated by humans only; and the second, a dataset with LLM pre-annotations curated by the same human annotators. We observe that the second setting leads to much higher agreement, as well as significant changes in label distribution and co-occurrence. Similar shifts do not appear in the LLM labels. Our findings show that use of LLMs in the annotation process leads to convergence in annotations and, thus, to an erosion of human subjectivity.