Artificial Intelligence and Civil Discourse: How LLMs Moderate Climate Change Conversations

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Autori principali: Fan, Wenlu, Xu, Wentao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Fan, Wenlu
Xu, Wentao
author_facet Fan, Wenlu
Xu, Wentao
contents As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into online platforms and digital communication spaces, their potential to influence public discourse - particularly in contentious areas like climate change - requires systematic investigation. This study examines how LLMs naturally moderate climate change conversations through their distinct communicative behaviors. We conduct a comparative analysis of conversations between LLMs and human users on social media platforms, using five advanced models: three open-source LLMs (Gemma, Llama 3, and Llama 3.3) and two commercial systems (GPT-4o by OpenAI and Claude 3.5 by Anthropic). Through sentiment analysis, we assess the emotional characteristics of responses from both LLMs and humans. The results reveal two key mechanisms through which LLMs moderate discourse: first, LLMs consistently display emotional neutrality, showing far less polarized sentiment than human users. Second, LLMs maintain lower emotional intensity across contexts, creating a stabilizing effect in conversations. These findings suggest that LLMs possess inherent moderating capacities that could improve the quality of public discourse on controversial topics. This research enhances our understanding of how AI might support more civil and constructive climate change discussions and informs the design of AI-assisted communication tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12077
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Artificial Intelligence and Civil Discourse: How LLMs Moderate Climate Change Conversations
Fan, Wenlu
Xu, Wentao
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into online platforms and digital communication spaces, their potential to influence public discourse - particularly in contentious areas like climate change - requires systematic investigation. This study examines how LLMs naturally moderate climate change conversations through their distinct communicative behaviors. We conduct a comparative analysis of conversations between LLMs and human users on social media platforms, using five advanced models: three open-source LLMs (Gemma, Llama 3, and Llama 3.3) and two commercial systems (GPT-4o by OpenAI and Claude 3.5 by Anthropic). Through sentiment analysis, we assess the emotional characteristics of responses from both LLMs and humans. The results reveal two key mechanisms through which LLMs moderate discourse: first, LLMs consistently display emotional neutrality, showing far less polarized sentiment than human users. Second, LLMs maintain lower emotional intensity across contexts, creating a stabilizing effect in conversations. These findings suggest that LLMs possess inherent moderating capacities that could improve the quality of public discourse on controversial topics. This research enhances our understanding of how AI might support more civil and constructive climate change discussions and informs the design of AI-assisted communication tools.
title Artificial Intelligence and Civil Discourse: How LLMs Moderate Climate Change Conversations
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12077