Epistemic Diversity and Knowledge Collapse in Large Language Models
Authors: name: Dustin Wright, name: Sarah Masud, name: Jared Moore, name: Srishti Yadav, name: Maria Antoniak, name: Chan Young Park, name: Isabelle Augenstein
Organization: CopeNLU

Large language models (LLMs) tend to generate lexically, semantically, and
stylistically homogenous texts. This poses a risk of knowledge collapse, where
homogenous LLMs mediate a shrinking in the range of accessible information over
time. Existing works on homogenization are limited by a focus on closed-ended
multiple-choice setups or fuzzy semantic features, and do not look at trends
across time and cultural contexts. To overcome this, we present a new
methodology to measure epistemic diversity, i.e., variation in real-world
claims in LLM outputs, which we use to perform a broad empirical study of LLM
knowledge collapse. We test 27 LLMs, 155 topics covering 12 countries, and 200
prompt variations sourced from real user chats. For the topics in our study, we
show that while newer models tend to generate more diverse claims, nearly all
models are less epistemically diverse than a basic web search. We find that
model size has a negative impact on epistemic diversity, while
retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has a positive impact, though the
improvement from RAG varies by the cultural context. Finally, compared to a
traditional knowledge source (Wikipedia), we find that country-specific claims
reflect the English language more than the local one, highlighting a gap in
epistemic representation