Foolish Pollsters Are Now Just Asking AI What Voters Would Say in Response to Questions and Publishing It at Face Value
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Last month, Axios was forced to issue a bizarre correction for a blog post about a growing maternal health crisis in the United States. The story quoted new poll findings by a company called Aaru, representing them as research based on the feedback of American adults. But according to an editor’s note, the piece had to be “updated to note that Aaru is an AI simulation research firm.” In other words, Axios had failed to disclose that it was citing alleged “polling data” that wasn’t drawn from human respondents at all. Instead, it was dreamed up by a large language model —yet the latest sign of every imaginable industry trying to leverage AI, even when doing so makes absolutely no sense. As Digital Theory Lab director Leif Weatherby and University of California, Berkeley, computer sciences professor Benjamin Recht explain in a guest essay for the New York Times, the practice that tricked Axios is called “silicon sampling,” and …
