The role of GPT as an adaptive technology in climate change journalism

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4o, have enabled automated content generation and adaptation, including summaries of news articles. To date, LLM use in a journalism context has been understudied, but can potentially address challenges of selective exposure and polarization by adapting content to end users. This study used a one-shot recommender platform to test whether LLM-generated news summaries were evaluated more positively than 'standard' 50-word news article previews. Moreover, using climate change news from the Washington Post, we also compared the influence of different 'emotional reframing' strategies to rewrite texts and their impact on the environmental behavioral intentions of end users. We used a 2 (between: Summary vs. 50-word previews) x 3 (within: fear, fear-hope or neutral reframing) research design. Participants (N = 300) were first asked to read news articles in our interface and to choose a preferred news article, while later performing an in-depth evaluation task on the usability (e.g., clarity) and trustworthiness of different framing strategies. The results showed that evaluations of summaries, while being positive, were not significantly better than those of previews. However, we did observe that a fear-hope reframing strategy of a news article, when paired with a GPT-generated summary, led to higher pro-environmental intentions compared to neutral framing. We discuss the potential benefits of this technology.