It's called 'silicon sampling' and it's going to ruin public opinion polling
Source: The Straits Times
Published on: 2026-04-07 05:09
A recent Axios story on maternal health policy referenced "findings" that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. On the surface, there's nothing unusual about that. What wasn't originally mentioned, however, was that these findings were made up. Clicking through the links revealed (as did a subsequent editor's note and clarification by Axios) that the public opinion poll was a computer simulation run by the artificial intelligence start-up Aaru. No people were involved in the creation of these opinions. The practice Aaru used is called silicon sampling, and it's suddenly everywhere. The idea behind silicon sampling is simple and tantalising. 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 po...
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