Reliable but Design-Sensitive: Instrument Uncertainty in LLM Annotation
Large language models (LLMs) can give reliable labels under one setup yet change those labels when researchers make other reasonable design choices. We tested seven LLMs, 12 task designs, three independent runs, and 3,000 tweets labeled for offensive language and hate speech. Repeating the same model and task design produced high agreement (median Fleiss' $κ= 0.91$). Agreement fell when we changed the task design for the same tweets (median Cohen's $κ= 0.76$). Task design and model choice increased the variance of estimated prevalence by factors of 76.7 for offensive language and 110.6 for hate speech compared with sampling variance alone. Variation across LLM task designs reached 560-572...
| Authors | Thomas Reiter, Christoph Kern, Fedor Miasnikov et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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