How Large Language Models Systematically Misrepresent American Climate Opinions

TL;DR

This study evaluates how large language models (LLMs) represent U.S. climate opinions across different demographic groups, revealing they tend to oversimplify and misrepresent intersectional opinion patterns, which could impact equitable policy-making.

Contribution

It compares LLM-generated responses to real human data across intersecting identities in climate opinions, highlighting systematic biases and the compression of opinion diversity.

Findings

LLMs predict less-diverse climate opinions, compressing actual opinion variation.

They apply uniform gender assumptions that match White and Hispanic Americans but misrepresent Black Americans.

These biases could undermine equitable climate policy and governance.

Abstract

Federal agencies and researchers increasingly use large language models to analyze and simulate public opinion. When AI mediates between the public and policymakers, accuracy across intersecting identities becomes consequential; inaccurate group-level estimates may mislead outreach, consultation, and policy design. While research examines intersectionality in LLM outputs, few studies have compared these outputs against real human responses across intersecting identities. Climate policy is one such domain, and this is particularly urgent for climate change, where opinion is contested and diverse. We investigate how LLMs represent demographic and intersectional patterns in U.S. climate opinions. We prompted six LLMs with profiles of 978 respondents from a nationally representative U.S. climate opinion survey and compared AI-generated responses to actual human answers across 20 questions. We find that LLMs appear to compress the diversity of American climate opinions, predicting less-concerned groups as more concerned and vice versa. This compression is intersectional: LLMs appear to apply uniform gender assumptions that match reality for White and Hispanic Americans but may misrepresent Black Americans, where actual gender patterns differ. These patterns, which may be invisible to standard auditing approaches, could undermine equitable climate governance.