Leveraging ChatGPT's Multimodal Vision Capabilities to Rank Satellite Images by Poverty Level: Advancing Tools for Social Science Research

Abstract

This paper investigates the novel application of Large Language Models (LLMs) with vision capabilities to analyze satellite imagery for village-level poverty prediction. Although LLMs were originally designed for natural language understanding, their adaptability to perform multimodal tasks, including geospatial analysis, has opened new frontiers in data-driven research. By leveraging advancements in vision-enabled LLMs, we assess their ability to provide interpretable, scalable, and reliable insights into human poverty from satellite images. Using a pairwise comparison approach, we demonstrate that ChatGPT can rank satellite images based on poverty levels with an accuracy comparable to a model trained on human-expert-identified image features and better than direct expert wealth classifications reported previously. These findings highlight both the promise and the limitations of LLMs in socioeconomic research, providing a foundation for their integration into poverty assessment workflows. This study contributes to the ongoing exploration of unconventional data sources for welfare analysis and opens pathways for cost-effective, large-scale poverty monitoring. Our results also put forward the question of how reliable public datasets, such as DHS, are for retrieving wealth indices that are anonymized by adding noise to the location coordinates. The code and data used for the analyses in this paper are publicly available.