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Auteurs principaux: Cheng, Mengjie, Ofek, Elie, Yoganarasimhan, Hema
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13444
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author Cheng, Mengjie
Ofek, Elie
Yoganarasimhan, Hema
author_facet Cheng, Mengjie
Ofek, Elie
Yoganarasimhan, Hema
contents We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives -- making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm's editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York Times, we first show that more engaging human-written content tends to be more polarizing. Further, naively employing LLMs (with prompts or standard Direct Preference Optimization approaches) to generate more engaging content can also increase polarization. This has an important managerial and policy implication: using LLMs without building in controls for limiting slant can exacerbate news media polarization. We present a constructive solution to this problem based on the Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with multi-objective optimization techniques. We build on open-source LLMs and develop a new language model that simultaneously makes content more engaging while maintaining a preferred editorial stance. Our model achieves this by modifying content characteristics strongly associated with polarization but that have a relatively smaller impact on engagement. Our approach and findings apply to other settings where firms seek to use LLMs for content creation to achieve multiple objectives, e.g., advertising and social media.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_13444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs
Cheng, Mengjie
Ofek, Elie
Yoganarasimhan, Hema
General Economics
Economics
We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives -- making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm's editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York Times, we first show that more engaging human-written content tends to be more polarizing. Further, naively employing LLMs (with prompts or standard Direct Preference Optimization approaches) to generate more engaging content can also increase polarization. This has an important managerial and policy implication: using LLMs without building in controls for limiting slant can exacerbate news media polarization. We present a constructive solution to this problem based on the Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with multi-objective optimization techniques. We build on open-source LLMs and develop a new language model that simultaneously makes content more engaging while maintaining a preferred editorial stance. Our model achieves this by modifying content characteristics strongly associated with polarization but that have a relatively smaller impact on engagement. Our approach and findings apply to other settings where firms seek to use LLMs for content creation to achieve multiple objectives, e.g., advertising and social media.
title Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13444