Recent studies have demonstrated promising potential of ChatGPT for various text annotation and classification tasks. However, ChatGPT is non-deterministic which means that, as with human coders, identical input can lead to different outputs. Given this, it seems appropriate to test the reliability of ChatGPT. Therefore, this study investigates the consistency of ChatGPT's zero-shot capabilities for text annotation and classification, focusing on different model parameters, prompt variations, and repetitions of identical inputs. Based on the real-world classification task of differentiating website texts into news and not news, results show that consistency in ChatGPT's classification output can fall short of scientific thresholds for reliability. For example, even minor wording alterations in prompts or repeating the identical input can lead to varying outputs. Although pooling outputs from multiple repetitions can improve reliability, this study advises caution when using ChatGPT for zero-shot text annotation and underscores the need for thorough validation, such as comparison against human-annotated data. The unsupervised application of ChatGPT for text annotation and classification is not recommended.

该研究调查了 ChatGPT 在零-shot 文本标注和分类任务中一致性的表现，包括模型参数、提示变化和相同输入的重复。结果显示 ChatGPT 的分类输出的一致性可能低于可靠性的科学阈值，并警告使用 ChatGPT 的谨慎性。建议进行彻底的验证，例如与人类注释数据的比较，并不推荐使用 ChatGPT 进行无监督文本标注和分类。

对 ChatGPT 文本注释和分类可靠性的测试：一则警示