Now just get AI pollsters and AI readers and leave us alone.
I used to work for one of the nation’s largest survey marketplaces. Y’all have no idea how deep this hole goes.
Surveys\polls are largely requested by political polling groups, research teams, and ad agencies. They put those up on an auction block just like ads, and then we would route traffic into it from various places. Mostly the survey takers come from mobile games (take this 3 question survey for 20 Blorp Points kind of stuff) or survey taker apps that give you points for gift cards and such.
So even before bots, most polls are taken by “professional” survey takers who use banks of phones to maximize their point earnings. We spent a lot of energy on “proving” to the survey provider side that real humans were answering, and not using scripts or bots to just rapid finish them (answer B to everything kind of stuff). Using sophisticated bots to randomly answer was super common.
They were super ready for AI. We talked about it everyday, game planned how it would work, designed systems around it. “Synthetic survey” was the buzz word. Why ask humans for answers if the statistics machine can convincingly predict the answer for you? We proposed ideas like generating the prediction fast and early, then using actual polls to adjust the result towards reality over time. We had tools to track people and connect their spending to poll questions so we could ask follow up questions on purchases, to provide “lift” metrics to agencies on if their ads were working. We were working on the “verification can” tech, only it would have been “Answer this 10 question survey to continue watching your movie.”
I was so glad to leave that place. They got bought and consolidated into the world’s largest survey company a year later and they fired everyone else that had been left. All they wanted was the tech and the customers.
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.
“why do they vote for lizards? cause if they didn’t then a worse lizard might get in”
“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.
We really need to kick this idea that rich people are smarter. The vast majority were born on third base and think they hit a home run.
I inherited my grandfather’s robber baron fortune, I’m a GENIUS!
AIs are WAY smarter than half the population. This will heavily skew the results.
We achieved human level AI not by making AI better, but by making ourselves dumber
