Did ChatGPT or Copilot use alter the style of internet news headlines? A time series regression analysis
This addresses the influence of LLMs on web content for researchers and media analysts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing NLP methods.
This study investigated whether the release of ChatGPT and Copilot changed the writing style of internet news headlines, finding that only some NLP features showed significant sustained changes, suggesting a limited impact.
The release of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Copilot is changing the way text is created and may influence the content that we find on the web. This study investigated whether the release of these two popular LLMs coincided with a change in writing style in headlines and links on worldwide news websites. 175 NLP features were obtained for each text in a dataset of 451 million headlines/links. An interrupted time series analysis was applied for each of the 175 NLP features to evaluate whether there were any statistically significant sustained changes after the release dates of ChatGPT and/or Copilot. There were a total of 44 features that did not appear to have any significant sustained change after the release of ChatGPT/Copilot. A total of 91 other features did show significant change with ChatGPT and/or Copilot although significance with earlier control LLM release dates (GPT-1/2/3, Gopher) removed them from consideration. This initial analysis suggests these language models may have had a limited impact on the style of individual news headlines/links, with respect to only some NLP measures.