But people could have replied that.!
Every single answer was indistinguishable from that of a human!
“I should base my surveys about human behavior solely on responses from non-human machines” said… someone, apparently? Damn. 💀
It’s very funny they even bother to do that. Why not just lie from the beginning? Why bother building a bullshit pyramid everyone can smell??
Seeing as the vast majority of “polls” I’ve seen in the last 5-6 years have been “this was a poll done online, so we can’t assign any certainty or margin of error, cause we have no idea who actually responded and it could’ve been just like, two dickheads with bots spamming nonsense, but the results were click baity enough for us to run a story” … I don’t see how them cutting out the two dickhead middle-men, and just using their own bots, is really that much different.
“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.
That someone is Peter Thiel according to this: https://corbettreport.com/the-stupidest-poll-of-all-time/
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.
The whole venture capitalism thing is bullshit. It’s just vibes and rich man hubris.
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.
Its the hill we all die on, since it affects so many. Even those who cant vote in those elections.
“why do they vote for lizards? cause if they didn’t then a worse lizard might get in”
I could never down vote Douglas Adams.
Having said that, when was the last time you had two candidates with exactly the same policies. Keeping literal Nazis out is a start, then you can participate in primaries, local politics or whatever for faster change. If you don’t participate then you are allowing the dickheads to choose.
PS by you I don’t mean you personally
Then I hope you enjoy the system you have because it will never change.
And not voting changes the system how, exactly?
And some are almost exactly the same but painted with two different colors of evil. Strategic voting forces you to choose one. If you think strategic voting is the answer, then that certainly is the hill you are going to die on because the false dichotomy of Kang and Kodos is absolutely going to kill you.
Strategic voting at least staves off the worst for a while. It’s not the solution, but it is part of a solution.
There’s no one single thing that will fix everything. Not protesting, not violent action, not voting. They are all part of a whole that is necessary to affecting lasting and positive change. Advocating that people not do one and only do the other lessens all action.
Absolutely agreed, my only point is that people treat it like it’s a victory and celebrate like they’ve won the superbowl, when it’s just death by a thousand cuts. People need to understand that strategic voting is not a victory even when it’s successful, it’s a “we haven’t lost yet”. The fighting doesn’t stop there. There is so much more work to do and the people you voted into office are not going to do it no matter what party they are. The corruption is on both sides of the aisle. The corruption doesn’t care what your personal politics are.
Try telling that to Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
What are you suggesting? Because nothing short of nationwide militant revolution is going to change the facts for any country. “Both sides are the same” is the kind of rhetoric that got the US in the shit it’s in now, for example. Yes, the system needs to be completely overhauled but that’s not going to happen overnight. Nobody’s saying strategic voting is the answer, it’s making the best of a bad situation. Sometimes you need to make incremental progress by choosing the least bad option, because the alternative is worse. No, Kamala would not have been the best pick to be US president, but if you are honestly saying she’d have been the same as Trump you either haven’t been paying attention for the last decade or are actively trying to disenfranchise voters. Either way, keep that shit to yourself.
That’s nonsense, you need to keep your militant revolution shit to yourself. Protests and civil disobedience are extremely powerful motivators that can affect real change, yes, but they are not a militant revolution, and there are grassroots and progressive options for democratic change. No, the US may never lose the two-party system, but voting is not just something you do for a president, and it does not always mean simply walking into a voting booth, casting your vote and going home and shrugging if the result isn’t the one you voted for.
Desegregation and women’s suffrage were both accomplished with great effort by accepting neither party’s position on the issues and actively forcing a third option onto the table. This was not accomplished by simply “voting for the democratic party a bunch of times”.
I’m not suggesting violence, I’m saying that’s the only thing that would change things overnight. Lasting change takes time. Desegregation and women’s sufferage didn’t magically spawn a third party, they were both accomplished by years of hard work forcing the two existing parties to acknowledge them as genuine issues. Throwing your hands up and saying “they’re all the same anyway” does nothing but make way for the people working very hard to make things worse.
Your problem isn’t with stats, polls are still valuable.
Your problem is political think tanks that pay for biased polling that reflects what they want instead of reality. And billionaire owned media presenting those biases stats with a straight face and hoping no one notices.
Imagine your back in college and the water bottle you just chugged had vodka in it.
That’s a bad bottle, but the take away should be “verify it’s water first” and not “never try to drink water again”.
Meaning you shouldn’t disregard all polls, it’s just responsible to take a real.looknamd not just believe headlines or even articles.
Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.
Even if you’ll never vote D in a general, there is literally no downside for voting for the left most candidate in the next Dem primary. Hell, you could even try voting for the left most candidate in the Republican primary instead, I don’t think that would be as effective though.
After all, it’s the first step in Marxism-Lenism:
Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism–Leninism
Personally I want to exit ramp before all the Stalin stuff, but you can’t argue that it didn’t work for him.
Yeah, it’s the whole “controlled by the state” thing I’ll never trust about marxism-leninism. You dont get an informed and organized population by subverting them and taking away their mobility.
Authoritarianism doesn’t lead to freedom.
Yeah, Lenin seized power by having all the soviets assassinated by bolsheviks after he lost an election to them. Then the USSR descended into widespread famine, surveillance, and state-sponsored massacres.
It’s wild how many people still swear by marxist-leninism, as if “just try it one more time, this time it’ll work, I swear!” Or even wilder “actually, widespread famine, surveillance, and monopolized violence in the USSR was good!”
And then they just smugly tell you to “read theory” because they assume you haven’t already, because they can’t imagine anyone would actually read it and think critically about it, since they sure as hell didn’t…
This is hilarious. And when it inevitably doesn’t work, they will have a human tweak the statistics of the “AI”. The irony of it all.
They could have an AI tweak the statistics if they seem unrealistic
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 dumberp
Smarter in some ways, but in most ways it is just a sycophantic hallucinatory machine.
in very NICHED and modified cases, like with cancer detection , that is not from commercial sources, even then its extremely limited and very reliant on using so many scans to even detect cancer.
Humans barely answer surveys as if they were human, this is some real derivative shit.
Republicans are going to love this
they love AI generated art/porn festishizing POC.
First off, got a chuckle from the bot check…
The story quoted new poll findings by a company called Aaru, representing them as research based on the feedback of American adults. But according to an editor’s note, the piece had to be “updated to note that Aaru is an AI simulation research firm.”
In other words, Axios had failed to disclose that it was citing alleged “polling data” that wasn’t drawn from human respondents at all. Instead, it was dreamed up by a large language model —yet the latest sign of every imaginable industry trying to leverage AI, even when doing so makes absolutely no sense.
This was/is a problem, but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever eat food again because someone got you to try a sardine and spinach chocolate cupcake one time.
In fact, the first, last, and most often brought up topic in graduate level statistical analysis isn’t about getting numbers, that’s easy. The hard part is finding the flaws in numbers, even in your own that proves yourself wrong.
The vast majority of people never learn that, or learn that bad stats have been a problem as long as stats has existed. Even making it thru peer review doesn’t always mean anything.
Like, every single time an article links to a study, do the due diligence and click, so what’s going, what the numbers really say, and search who funds them.
It’s not like you’ll even know what to look for at first, but if you never try you’ll never improve.
but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever eat food again because someone got you to try a sardine and spinach chocolate cupcake one time.
I won’t die if I give up on stats.
Let me fix your analogy:
but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever read newspapers again because you once read a tabloid rag that was full of falsehoods and lies.
And that’s a more reasonable approximation.
I won’t die if I give up on stats.
Society, especially any remaining vestiges of democracy would…
It would mean a population of voters informed solely by propaganda or not at all.
Like, I get what you’re saying.
But youre thinking about a personal level, which the cupcake example was.
Polling/democracy is a societal level, and starving there is the full on death of democracy. And all the assorted damage that comes with that.
I’m sorry I didn’t make that clearer, I thought the personal/societal jump was implied
You really think democracy can’t possibly work without opinion polling?
It would mean a population of voters informed solely by propaganda or not at all.
99% of opinion polling is propaganda. It’s relatively easy to make the outcome of a poll whatever you want it to be, especially when most of your viewers/readers don’t (or can’t) dig into it to find the raw polling data. And even when a poll doesn’t go the way you’d like, you can just bury it or refuse to publish it and run another poll until you get the result you wanted.
99% of opinion polling is propaganda.
I mean, if you invent ones that frequently, yeah, but who cares when people who don’t know about stats make up stats?
That’s literally the point I’m trying to make here,you’re so close to getting it
Every LLM is a fascist propaganda machine
This is so stupid it is hilarious. I guess the first question to the customer is what they want to know, and the second question is what they want as a result.
Polling has been getting increasingly worse for decades now.
Their accuracy died with the monoculture and no amount of multilevel regression and post-stratification seems to compensate for that
Their accuracy died when people like me became difficult to poll.
I don’t answer phone calls from unknown callers. I delete unsolicited text messages. I throw away irrelevant junk mail without opening it. I automatically delete emails that don’t come from my whitelist of approved senders. I don’t answer the door for door-to-door solicitors.
How are pollsters supposed to find out about the opinions of me and people like me? It’s just impossible. And I don’t think I’m alone – there’s a large and growing portion of the population who are just absolutely impossible to get poll data about.
same its all old people doing it. i made the mistake of answer poll by phone during obama era, it takes like almost 30min to answer all that questioning.
In the future you won’t own anything. Even your opinion
