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This content will become publicly available on October 25, 2024

Title: Generative AI and Discovery of Preferences for Single-Use Plastics Regulations
Given the heightened global awareness and attention to the negative externalities of plastics use, many state and local governments are considering legislation that will limit single-use plastics for consumers and retailers under extended producer responsibility laws. Considering the growing momentum of these climate regulations globally, there is a need for reliable and cost-effective measures of the public response to this rulemaking for inference and prediction. Automated computational approaches such as generative AI could enable real-time discovery of consumer preferences for regulations but have yet to see broad adoption in this domain due to concerns about evaluation costs and reliability across large-scale social data. In this study, we leveraged the zero and few-shot learning capabilities of GPT-4 to classify public sentiment towards regulations with increasing complexity in expert prompting. With a zero-shot approach, we achieved a 92% F1 score (s.d. 1%) and 91% accuracy (s.d. 1%), which resulted in three orders of magnitude lower research evaluation cost at 0.138 pennies per observation. We then use this model to analyze 5,132 tweets related to the policy process of the California SB-54 bill, which mandates user fees and limits plastic packaging. The policy study reveals a 12.4% increase in opposing public sentiment immediately after the bill was enacted with no significant changes earlier in the policy process. These findings shed light on the dynamics of public engagement with lower cost models for research evaluation. We find that public opposition to single-use plastics regulation becomes evident in social data only when a bill is effectively enacted.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2028998 1945332
NSF-PAR ID:
10472472
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Editor(s):
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Publisher / Repository:
Proceedings of the AAAI 2023 Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Climate: The Role of AI in a Climate-Smart Sustainable Future
Date Published:
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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