Is ChatGPT a Reliable Source of Transportation Equity Information for Scientific Writing?

Transportation equity is an interdisciplinary agenda that requires both transportation and social inputs. Traditionally, transportation equity information is sourced from public libraries, conferences, television, and social media, among others. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including advanced language models such as ChatGPT, are becoming favorite information sources. However, their credibility has not been well explored. This study explored the content and usefulness of ChatGPT-generated information related to transportation equity. It utilized 152 papers retrieved through the Web of Science (WoS) repository. The prompt was crafted for ChatGPT to provide an abstract given the paper’s title. The ChatGPT’s abstracts were then compared to human-written abstracts using statistical tools and unsupervised text mining. The results indicate a weak similarity between ChatGPT and human-written abstracts. On average, the human-written and ChatGPT-generated abstracts were about 58% similar, with a maximum and minimum of 97% and 1.4%, respectively. The keywords from the abstracts of papers with over the mean similarity score were more likely to be similar, whereas those below the average score were less likely to be similar. Themes with high similarity scores include access, public transit, and policy, among others. Further, clear differences in the key pattern of clusters for high and low similarity score abstracts were observed. Contrarily, the findings from collocated keywords were inconclusive. The study findings suggest that ChatGPT has the potential to be a source of transportation equity information. However, currently, a great amount of attention is needed before a user can utilize materials from ChatGPT.