Large Scale Narrative Messaging around Climate Change: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to extract and analyze the latent narrative messaging in climate change-related news articles from North American and Chinese media. By defining "narrative messaging" as the intrinsic moral or lesson of a story, we apply our model to a dataset of approximately 15,000 news articles in English and Mandarin, categorized by climate-related topics and ideological groupings. Our findings reveal distinct differences in the narrative values emphasized by different cultural and ideological contexts, with North American sources often focusing on individualistic and crisis-driven themes, while Chinese sources emphasize developmental and cooperative narratives. This work demonstrates the potential of LLMs in understanding and influencing climate communication, offering new insights into the collective belief systems that shape public discourse on climate change across different cultures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.022 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".