It’s Called Silicon Sampling, and It’s Going to Ruin Public Opinion Polling |
It’s Called Silicon Sampling, and It’s Going to Ruin Public Opinion Polling
By Leif Weatherby and Benjamin Recht
Dr. Weatherby is the director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. Dr. Recht is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
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 tantalizing. Because large language models can generate responses that emulate human answers, polling companies see an opportunity to use A.I. agents to simulate survey responses at a small fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling.
Phone polling has become exponentially harder. Web polling is too uncertain. Silicon sampling removes the messy, costly part of asking people what they think.
But this undermines the very idea of the opinion poll. Public opinion is used to guide policy, politics and social science, and it has value only insofar as it summarizes the beliefs and opinions of actual humans. Using simulations of human opinions in place of the real thing will only worsen our broken information ecosystem, and sow distrust. We should not turn to an artificial society to try to understand our real one.
The journalist Walter Lippmann, in his influential 1922 book “Public Opinion,” wrote that humans form “pictures in their heads” of the societies they live in. He called these pictures “fictions” and “pseudo-environments,” arguing that a democracy needed tools to fix those pictures, and that opinion polling could serve that role. Surveys would never be perfect, but Mr. Lippmann thought they were critical for getting us closer to an accurate sense of the will of the people.
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