Large language models (LLMs) offer an inexpensive yet powerful way to annotate text, but are often inconsistent when compared with experts. These errors can bias downstream estimates of population parameters such as regression coefficients and causal effects. To mitigate this bias, researchers have developed debiasing methods such as Design-based Supervised Learning (DSL) and Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI), which promise valid estimation by combining LLM annotations with a limited number of expensive expert annotations.Although these methods produce consistent estimates under theoretical assumptions, it is unknown how they compare in finite samples of sizes encountered in applied research. We make two contributions: First, we study how each method’s performance scales with the number of expert annotations, highlighting regimes where LLM bias or limited expert labels significantly affect results. Second, we compare DSL and PPI across a range of tasks, finding that although both achieve low bias with large datasets, DSL often outperforms PPI on bias reduction and empirical efficiency, but its performance is less consistent across datasets. Our findings indicate that there is a bias-variance tradeoff at the level of debiasing methods, calling for more research on developing metrics for quantifying their efficiency in finite samples.

We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to disentangle text variables—to remove the textual traces of an undesired forbidden variable in a task sometimes known as text distillation and closely related to the fairness in AI and causal inference literature. We employ a range of various LLM approaches in an attempt to disentangle text by identifying and removing information about a target variable while preserving other relevant signals. We show that in the strong test of removing sentiment, the statistical association between the processed text and sentiment is still detectable to machine learning classifiers post-LLM-disentanglement. Furthermore, we find that human annotators also struggle to disentangle sentiment while preserving other semantic content. This suggests there may be limited separability between concept variables in some text contexts, highlighting limitations of methods relying on text-level transformations and also raising questions about the robustness of disentanglement methods that achieve statistical independence in representation space.