historic drystone sheep dykeThe part of me that used to work for a survey research nonprofit is screaming into a pillow
Our innovative approach: instead of doing something, we simply do not do it. at a fraction of the cost
Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)@hannah millennials kill yet another industry! *adds a notch*
Elizabeth 
unlofl [Promoted Toot]@hannah obviously the model needs to be trained on a sample of typical responses from the specific population(s) to be surveyed.
... so, thats it, AI something something magically gets more precision out of the same dataset, by adding simulated data? They're saying the simulated responses are more accurate than the real responses???
@hannah Wait, I've got a better idea that will still cut their polling costs in half: we survey people but with half the standard sample size, then we run it all through a photo copier and tabulate the results. We'll get the normal sample size and accuracy!
Also, copy machines use a lot less power than AI, its win-win!
eclexic@theeclecticdyslexic @hannah Just asking your buddy and relying on a single data point would be funny, except the way Chuck Schumer has been making decisions is actually even worse because he asks his imaginary friends.
Andrew
Alex P. 👹
CurmudgeonThis could revolutionize statistical analyses.
You can greatly increase the sample size at almost no cost!
Reducing size of confidence intervals!
Clearly (48.136, 48.138)% is from a far superior study to one that reports (45, 51)%.
bob
SJ
Michael Cook@hannah 🤦♂️ They can’t possibly be that dumb can they?
(Yes I know)
Andy Gates@foobarsoft @hannah I bet they are hip deep in "digital twin" kool-aid.
@andygates @foobarsoft bingo, those are mentioned later in the article
Dan SugalskiMe: Screams into the void
Void: Due to increased volumes the void can't answer your scream at the moment. Your scream is very important to us, please hold, there are only 31,415,926 people ahead of you in the scream queue.
let's regular posting
Chinga la migra! 🍉🌈@hannah manufacturing consent
Patch Arcana@hannah I feel like this practice is a fundamental misunderstanding of its own problem space.
This doesn't come within three or four degrees of freedom of measuring what the advocates seem to think it measures.
Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs
Ludwig Vielfrass@hannah Well, shit, I can make old-school Markov chainbots that will answer your poll questions that will emulate human answers too. This is literally less than useless.
I, Ore Chap@hannah oh this is going to fuck up so many things in an election year
Joe Kaufeld@hannah what the fuck
Spring Jo 🥚 
🍀@hannah what the actual fuck is this
Not a Spring Onion10/10 LLMs think that this is a tremendous idea.
I have a hard time getting over this.
I tried irony. Sarcasm. I duckduckgoed the word.
Maybe the article misunderstood something? No, doesn't look that way.
Sure, there is bias in any sort of polling or study. The way you phrase things can influence how they are answered.
But this is just a dice roll with more words.
No wait, dice rolls can't be manipulated that easily to skew opinion.
Bill, organizer of stuff@hannah I have this same instinctive response every time I've seen reference to "synthetic data." People have been (successfully!) selling this crap for almost a decade!
There is no way to synthesize data that meaningfully replicates a real world investigation. Simulate volume? Sure. Test specific scenarios or fuzz inputs? Yep, I'll buy that. But there is no expositive value in synthetic data - by definition. It's synthetic! It reflects only the algorithms used to synthesize it! 🤦
UnlikelyLass@hannah "we're going to make up numbers now instead of polling" is a hell of A Choice ™️
Zoi und Einhorn@hannah hello? I’d like to return my psychology degree for a full refund. I guess I don’t need all that statistics and test theory and construction any more. I was fun while it lasted though. (It wasn’t.) /s
Paul_IPv6
Earthshine@hannah this truly is the death of all information integrity everywhere.
Klara in the hidden land@hannah Aaaaaaah.
WellsiteGeo@hannah Feeding the dog it's own vomit. Force-feeding.
Nick Karpowicz@WellsiteGeo @hannah Fraction of the cost; infinite food glitch; gonna be a dog vomit billionaire
Alex UsedToGoToVenice@hannah qualtrics floated this (and maybe went through with it idk) right after chatgpt first went live
What hilarious is that this agentic things is plausibly *worse* since you're having simulations fill out the survey instead instead of using an llm to generate a bazillion responses. The responses will still be just as bad, but at a huge markup of energy costs
Я⊛ḶḶ model ☭nothing is real
Steven Sandoval@hannah Wow, sock-puppeting at scale.
Directed Alberto Cetoli Graph
Jade
Intaglio Whitegraven@hannah Perhaps I'm just missing something obvious here, but...isn't the whole point of conducting surveys to gather data from people? If the only entities being surveyed are A.I. agents that mimic human speech and which could be programmed to say anything, how is it meaningful?
It seems as meaningful to me as "Our survey data says 95% of people approve our product. We surveyed 1000 people whom we paid $100 each to say positive things about us."
Tom Magnanimous@Intaglio_Dragon @hannah I wanna hang out with the people who took the hundred dollars and were still like "fuck you, your product sucks"
tessarakt@Intaglio_Dragon @hannah you missed the "for a fraction of the cost" part.
Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸@hannah next up: instead of spending budget money on organizing elections, we'll just run 400 millions of AI agents, give them personas representing the US demographic, and ask them who would they vote for.
GeraintEfficient! What could possibly go wrong with that?!
Reminds me of Asimov's short story Franchise. I wonder where these companies get their innovative ideas from?
Naga (he/him)
Going T. Maine@hannah "tantalizing" ain't the word.
Garrett Wollman@hannah Sounds like someone read about the bootstrap without actually understanding why it works.
Kitten Flare@hannah what the actual fucking fuck? So you "simulate" a poll and it generates whatever bullshit outcome you ask for
lfzz
Ben Pfaff
Kaisla
Gentleman Programmer@hannah The word "traditional" should be deleted
Ivan Sagalaev 
@hannah "we used a machine that can pretend to be a person to pretend that we do research".
Vincent 🌻🇪🇺 en 🌹☘️@hannah “Just making shit up” has gotten really complicated lately
@hannah Same on all counts...
Mechanical Turk taken to its irrational extreme.
Ann Annas