AI being used to participate in pay-for opinion polling at scale? Shocked I tell you! Shocked! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/28/how-fraudulent-church-data-revealed-ais-threat-to-polling
‘Our assumptions are broken’: how fraudulent church data revealed AI’s threat to polling

Experts say paid participants are using automated tools to generate unreliable survey responses at scale

The Guardian

@Footle

Oh, yeh, LLMs generate outputs designed to be plausible extensions of the input... so if the input is a survey and there's *any* implicit push in the survey, even unintentional, that's what the LLM is going to generate.

@Footle

Gives a modern meaning to the traditional concept of 'pious fraud'!😜

@Footle
Interesting article; but I'm a bit put off by this paragraph buried halfway through, as the article's framing strongly suggests the opposite at first.