Same Facts, Different Remedy: Linguistic Profiling and Arbitrariness in LLM and System One Decisions

원문 초록

Large language models are increasingly used to resolve consumer complaints, and the way complainants write varies with age, education and socioeconomic status (SES). We audit three remedy-decision systems using sociolinguistic rewrites of US consumer financial complaints that are instructed to preserve every fact: two generative LLMs that return a single label (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-5-mini) and a probabilistic "System One" model that returns a distribution over remedies (Jev). Using pre-registered hypotheses tested once on held-out complaints, we separate two phenomena that single-label audits conflate. At the group scale, older, college-educated and higher-SES styles receive slightly more generous remedies; these effects replicate but are small, with every monetary-remedy gap within 0.5 percentage points. At the individual scale, two style versions of the same complaint receive different monetary decisions 2.6-6.3% of the time. In a variance-component analysis of the probabilistic model, persona components shared across the two rewrite models account for about 1.6% of within-complaint variation. The persona gaps are associated mainly with delivery (vocabulary, grammar, politeness) rather than content. Positive controls show that all three systems respond 49-387 times more strongly to remedy-relevant facts than to style. Rewriting every complaint into one standard style reduced GPT-4o-mini's education and SES gaps by 94% and 87% while retaining fact sensitivity, but reversed two of the probabilistic model's gaps and did not make individual decisions more stable. Independent LLM auditors flagged material fact changes in 3.3% and 11.7% of rewrites, and instability persisted among unflagged rewrites. Fairness audits of LLM decision systems should report group disparities and individual instability as separate outcomes.