Instead of asking humans who they would vote for, try to understand the nuances of their thoughts and concerns, let those messages bubble up to candidates so they can adjust their campaign to meet voters’ demand, instead of that, why not just segment humans into a bunch of shallow stereotypes (the socialist Millennial, the conservative Boomer, the liberal city dweller, the rancorous rural voter who feels left behind…) and then have some AI agents replicate how those people would respond?
Surely nothing could go wrong.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
With just a small fraction of people picking up their phones for political polling, Harvard experts are suggesting that pollsters “call” artificial intelligence simulations of voters instead.
In a study published by the Harvard Data Science Review last fall, editorial writers Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier said that when they posed typical polling questions to ChatGPT and instructed it to respond from various political perspectives, the chatbot generally responded the way humans would the majority of the time.
ChatGPT’s only slip-up, as the researchers explained in their more recent writing, occurred when they had the chatbot cosplay as a liberal voter and asked it about American support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
As Sanders and Schneier observed, it likened that support to the Iraq War because it “didn’t know how the politics had changed” since 2021, when the large language model (LLM) undergirding it at the time had last been trained.
“Today’s pollsters are challenged to reach sample sizes large enough to measure statistically significant differences between similar populations,” they continued, “and the issues of nonresponse and inauthentic response can make them systematically wrong.”
Amid ample concerns about broader misuses of AI during elections, including with the kinds of deepfakes and disinformation seen in the re-election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this technology’s use in polling could well muddy up the works even further.
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