“The idea behind silicon sampling is simple and tantalizing,” they write. “Because large language models can generate responses that emulate human answers, polling companies see an opportunity to use AI agents to simulate survey responses at a small fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling.”
Somebody invested money into this company. And there’s at least hundreds, maybe thousands, of other businesses with these asinine ideas about how to use AI. They’re all getting capital from someone who’s supposed to be smart because they have capital. Remember that when llm providers cost correct token prices.
The whole venture capitalism thing is bullshit. It’s just vibes and rich man hubris.
Just one more thing losing contact with reality.
Good news, maybe this means people will finally stop trusting polls so those of us who still have some semblance of democracy can go vote for the things we actually want to see changed instead of having our choices prejudiced by polls that tell us we must “strategically vote” so we can’t have nice things.
Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.
nonoNoNoNO
Not voting is voting. No politician is going to agree with you on everything and some are much much worse than others.
This is the hill I die on.
Its the hill we all die on, since it affects so many. Even those who cant vote in those elections.
And some are almost exactly the same but painted with two different colors of evil. Strategic voting forces you to choose one. If you think strategic voting is the answer, then that certainly is the hill you are going to die on because the false dichotomy of Kang and Kodos is absolutely going to kill you.
What are you suggesting? Because nothing short of nationwide militant revolution is going to change the facts for any country. “Both sides are the same” is the kind of rhetoric that got the US in the shit it’s in now, for example. Yes, the system needs to be completely overhauled but that’s not going to happen overnight. Nobody’s saying strategic voting is the answer, it’s making the best of a bad situation. Sometimes you need to make incremental progress by choosing the least bad option, because the alternative is worse. No, Kamala would not have been the best pick to be US president, but if you are honestly saying she’d have been the same as Trump you either haven’t been paying attention for the last decade or are actively trying to disenfranchise voters. Either way, keep that shit to yourself.
That’s nonsense, you need to keep your militant revolution shit to yourself. Protests and civil disobedience are extremely powerful motivators that can affect real change, yes, but they are not a militant revolution, and there are grassroots and progressive options for democratic change. No, the US may never lose the two-party system, but voting is not just something you do for a president, and it does not always mean simply walking into a voting booth, casting your vote and going home and shrugging if the result isn’t the one you voted for.
Desegregation and women’s suffrage were both accomplished with great effort by accepting neither party’s position on the issues and actively forcing a third option onto the table. This was not accomplished by simply “voting for the democratic party a bunch of times”.
Your problem isn’t with stats, polls are still valuable.
Your problem is political think tanks that pay for biased polling that reflects what they want instead of reality. And billionaire owned media presenting those biases stats with a straight face and hoping no one notices.
Imagine your back in college and the water bottle you just chugged had vodka in it.
That’s a bad bottle, but the take away should be “verify it’s water first” and not “never try to drink water again”.
Meaning you shouldn’t disregard all polls, it’s just responsible to take a real.looknamd not just believe headlines or even articles.
Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.
Even if you’ll never vote D in a general, there is literally no downside for voting for the left most candidate in the next Dem primary. Hell, you could even try voting for the left most candidate in the Republican primary instead, I don’t think that would be as effective though.
After all, it’s the first step in Marxism-Lenism:
Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism–Leninism
Personally I want to exit ramp before all the Stalin stuff, but you can’t argue that it didn’t work for him.
Yeah, it’s the whole “controlled by the state” thing I’ll never trust about marxism-leninism. You dont get an informed and organized population by subverting them and taking away their mobility.
Authoritarianism doesn’t lead to freedom.
Humans barely answer surveys as if they were human, this is some real derivative shit.
Republicans are going to love this
First off, got a chuckle from the bot check…
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.
This was/is a problem, but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever eat food again because someone got you to try a sardine and spinach chocolate cupcake one time.
In fact, the first, last, and most often brought up topic in graduate level statistical analysis isn’t about getting numbers, that’s easy. The hard part is finding the flaws in numbers, even in your own that proves yourself wrong.
The vast majority of people never learn that, or learn that bad stats have been a problem as long as stats has existed. Even making it thru peer review doesn’t always mean anything.
Like, every single time an article links to a study, do the due diligence and click, so what’s going, what the numbers really say, and search who funds them.
It’s not like you’ll even know what to look for at first, but if you never try you’ll never improve.
but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever eat food again because someone got you to try a sardine and spinach chocolate cupcake one time.
I won’t die if I give up on stats.
Let me fix your analogy:
but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever read newspapers again because you once read a tabloid rag that was full of falsehoods and lies.
And that’s a more reasonable approximation.
I won’t die if I give up on stats.
Society, especially any remaining vestiges of democracy would…
It would mean a population of voters informed solely by propaganda or not at all.
Like, I get what you’re saying.
But youre thinking about a personal level, which the cupcake example was.
Polling/democracy is a societal level, and starving there is the full on death of democracy. And all the assorted damage that comes with that.
I’m sorry I didn’t make that clearer, I thought the personal/societal jump was implied
You really think democracy can’t possibly work without opinion polling?
It would mean a population of voters informed solely by propaganda or not at all.
99% of opinion polling is propaganda. It’s relatively easy to make the outcome of a poll whatever you want it to be, especially when most of your viewers/readers don’t (or can’t) dig into it to find the raw polling data. And even when a poll doesn’t go the way you’d like, you can just bury it or refuse to publish it and run another poll until you get the result you wanted.
99% of opinion polling is propaganda.
I mean, if you invent ones that frequently, yeah, but who cares when people who don’t know about stats make up stats?
That’s literally the point I’m trying to make here,you’re so close to getting it
Surveys have always been nonsense. I suppose if you are legitimately trying to find something out then that is one thing, but almost every group doing surveys has an ulterior motive. If the data starts looking bad for them, they just don’t release it or they cherry-pick who they are talking to by how they gather the data. Either way, it is always skewed towards the advantage of whoever is paying the tab.
Yup.
This is so stupid it is hilarious. I guess the first question to the customer is what they want to know, and the second question is what they want as a result.
Every LLM is a fascist propaganda machine
Polling has been getting increasingly worse for decades now.
Their accuracy died with the monoculture and no amount of multilevel regression and post-stratification seems to compensate for that
Their accuracy died when people like me became difficult to poll.
I don’t answer phone calls from unknown callers. I delete unsolicited text messages. I throw away irrelevant junk mail without opening it. I automatically delete emails that don’t come from my whitelist of approved senders. I don’t answer the door for door-to-door solicitors.
How are pollsters supposed to find out about the opinions of me and people like me? It’s just impossible. And I don’t think I’m alone – there’s a large and growing portion of the population who are just absolutely impossible to get poll data about.
In the future you won’t own anything. Even your opinion
Are we the dumbest species alive or what? ffs
That should be illegal.
Jail the fuckers
I mean if someone is paying them to do the poll, then it’s fraud and already illegal
But of course they are.
the nu dark age
