A Preliminary Study of ChatGPT on News Recommendation: Personalization, Provider Fairness, and Fake News

Online news platforms commonly employ personalized news recommendation methods to assist users in discovering interesting articles, and many previous works have utilized language model techniques to capture user interests and understand news content. With the emergence of large language models such as the GPT, T5 and LLaMA series, a new recommendation paradigm has emerged, leveraging pre-trained language models for making recommendations. ChatGPT, with its user-friendly interface and growing popularity, has become a prominent choice for text-based tasks. Considering the growing reliance on ChatGPT for language tasks, the importance of news recommendation in addressing social issues, and the trend of using language models in recommendations, this study conducts an initial investigation of ChatGPT’s performance in news recommendations, focusing on three perspectives: personalized news recommendation, news provider fairness, and fake news detection. Since the output of ChatGPT is sensitive to the input phrasing, we therefore aim to explore the constraints present in the generated responses of ChatGPT for each perspective. Additionally, we investigate whether specific prompt formats can alleviate these constraints or if these limitations require further attention from researchers in the future. We also surpass fixed evaluations by developing a webpage to monitor ChatGPT’s performance on weekly basis on the tasks and prompts we investigated. Our aim is to contribute to and encourage more researchers to engage in the study of enhancing news recommendation performance through the utilization of large language models such as ChatGPT.