Recently, work in NLP has shifted to few-shot (in-context) learning, with large language models (LLMs) performing well across a range of tasks. However, while fairness evaluations have become a standard for supervised methods, little is known about the fairness of LLMs as prediction systems. Further, common standard methods for fairness involve access to model weights or are applied during finetuning, which are not applicable in few-shot learning. Do LLMs exhibit prediction biases when used for standard NLP tasks?In this work, we analyze the effect of shots, which directly affect the performance of models, on the fairness of LLMs as NLP classification systems. We consider how different shot selection strategies, both existing and new demographically sensitive methods, affect model fairness across three standard fairness datasets. We find that overall the performance of LLMs is not indicative of their fairness, and there is not a single method that fits all scenarios. In light of these facts, we discuss how future work can include LLM fairness in evaluations.

While large language models (LLMs) are extremely capable at text generation, their outputs are still distinguishable from human-authored text. We explore this separation across many metrics over text, many sampling techniques, many types of text data, and across two popular LLMs, LLaMA and Vicuna. Along the way, we introduce a new metric, recoverability, to highlight differences between human and machine text; and we propose a new sampling technique, burst sampling, designed to close this gap. We find that LLaMA and Vicuna have distinct distributions under many of the metrics, and that this influences our results: Recoverability separates real from fake text better than any other metric when using LLaMA. When using Vicuna, burst sampling produces text which is distributionally closer to real text compared to other sampling techniques.