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“AI polls” are fake polls

A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.

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New YouTube report shows how online animators are reshaping the entertainment industry

Independent creators on YouTube are redefining the animation landscape as global audiences shift their focus toward original online series. This report explores how a new generation of animators reaches millions of people through digital platforms and cross-language content.

Apr 9 • 8:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • blog.youtube

Amazon says annual revenue run rate for chips business now over $20 billion

Amazon.com's annual revenue ​run rate for ‌its chips business, which ​produces its ​Graviton and Trainium ⁠processors, is ​now over $20 ​billion, CEO Andy Jassy said in ​a ​letter to shareholders on ‌Thursday.

Apr 9 • 6:20 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

I'm one of 48 million unpaid caregivers. Health care collapses without us.

Caring for my mother isn't just physical. It's emotional, relentless and often invisible. I constantly anticipate risk while trying to save dignity.

Apr 9 • 6:02 AM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

Video Boy goes viral sharing his love of science

Sean Atitsgobe, 11, has gained more than a million followers on social media and hopes to attend college by 13.

Apr 9 • 5:51 AM EDT • Science • abcnews.com

In Nebraska, wildfires are turning cattle ranching into a tricky business

Nearly a million acres in the state have burned this year. One expert calls it ‘a new kind of wildfire era.’

Apr 9 • 4:45 AM EDT • Business • yahoo.com

Detroit Lions NFL Draft Injury Report: LSU S AJ Haulcy

AJ Haulcy NFL Draft medical report. Full injury analysis heading into the 2026 NFL draft. How will it affect Detroit Lions draft strategy?

Apr 8 • 9:47 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Global women's sports revenue to top $3 billion in 2026, according to new report

Soccer and basketball are expected to be the the top revenue-generating women's sports.

Apr 8 • 8:00 PM EDT • Sports • nbcmiami.com

News | Plans for 1.6 million square foot Manchester airport-based science and innovation campus lodged

MIX MANCHESTER focuses on a 60-acre site

Apr 8 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • costar.com

Golisano Institute prepares to build business innovation in Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — In 1971, Tom Golisano had $3,000 and an idea — to start his company Paychex. Decades later, the billionaire from Rochester is inspiring others to find their passi…

Apr 8 • 6:17 PM EDT • Business • wivb.com

TNT Sports & CBS Sports Deliver Most Watched NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship Game in Seven Years with 18.3 Million Viewers on TBS, TNT and truTV

Apr 8 • 5:52 PM EDT • Sports • ncaa.com

Essentia Health-Fosston breaks ground on new emergency department

Essentia Health leaders, staff and project partners gathered Wednesday, April 8, to break ground on a new emergency department at Essentia Health-Fosston, marking the start of construction on a $12 million project that will improve the patient experience and strengthen care for the Fosston community.

Apr 8 • 4:16 PM EDT • Health • essentiahealth.org

NASA’s Artemis II mission holds special meaning for Alabama ‘rocket science’ Episcopalians

[Episcopal News Service] NASA’s successful April 1 launch of Artemis II, the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972, drew more than 18 million viewers and nearly 400,000 spectators to Florida’…

Apr 8 • 3:35 PM EDT • Science • episcopalnewsservice.org

Google Offers Free PC Upgrade For 500 Million Windows Users

All change for Windows — it's now decision time for 30% of all PC owners.

Apr 8 • 3:16 PM EDT • Technology • forbes.com

White House Budget For 2027 Set To Slash Science, Climate, And Environment Funding By Billions

Meanwhile, the military is hoping to receive a 44 percent increase in funding.

Apr 8 • 12:16 PM EDT • Science • iflscience.com

How does mitochondrial DNA affect your health? - Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Highlights Salk scientists have created a platform to study mitochondrial DNA mutations that lead or contribute to human disease They generated a library of 155 mitochondrial DNA mutant cells, nearly the human level of mitochondrial DNA mutant diversity The platform and library will accelerate innovation in the mitochondrial disease therapeutic space LA JOLLA—Some of your most important life partners are the mitochondria that power all your cells. You and these little cellular powerhouses are in a 1.5-billion-year-old evolutionary relationship—but mitochondria brought some baggage. Mitochondria brought their own DNA with them when they joined with the bigger, more complex cells so long ago, and today that mitochondrial DNA influences human health.

Apr 8 • 11:00 AM EDT • Health • salk.edu

Trump’s personnel agency is asking for federal workers’ medical records

The Trump administration is quietly seeking unprecedented access to medical records for millions of federal workers and retirees, and their families.

Apr 8 • 10:45 AM EDT • Health • cnn.com

Trump’s Personnel Agency Is Asking for Federal Workers’ Medical Records

By Amanda Seitz and Maia Rosenfeld | KFF Health News The Trump administration is quietly seeking unprecedented access to medical records for millions of federal workers and retirees, and their families. A brief notice from the Office of Personnel Management could dramatically change which personally ...

Apr 8 • 10:45 AM EDT • Health • usnews.com

Commission to consider Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center expansion

The Sedgwick County Commission could approve a $20 million expansion for the county’s Regional Forensic Science Center.

Apr 8 • 9:18 AM EDT • Science • ksn.com

Polygon Labs in Talks to Raise Up to $100 Million for Payments Business

Polygon Labs, developer of the blockchain that underpins prediction market Polymarket and other crypto platforms, is in early talks with investors to raise as much as $100 million to build a new stablecoin payments business, according to people familiar with the talks. The funding discussions ...

Apr 8 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • theinformation.com

Africa CDC Secures Over US$300 Million to Advance Africa’s Global Health Security Agenda at the Lyon One Health Summit in Lyon (France)

Lyon / Addis Ababa / Brussels, 8 April 2026 – The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) welcomes the outcomes of the One Health Summit held in Lyon, France, that affirms a decisive shift: Africa is no longer at the margins of global health—it is shaping its future. Africa CDC expresses its […]

Apr 8 • 8:51 AM EDT • Health • africacdc.org

Africa CDC Secures Over US$250 Million to Advance Africa’s Global Health Security Agenda at the Lyon One Health Summit in Lyon (France)

Lyon / Addis Ababa / Brussels, 8 April 2026 – The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) welcomes the outcomes of the One Health Summit held in Lyon, France, that affirms a decisive shift: Africa is no longer at the margins of global health—it is shaping its future. Africa CDC expresses its […]

Apr 8 • 8:51 AM EDT • Health • africacdc.org

This week in Santa Cruz County business: County reaches settlement with Walgreens; businesses invited to partake in World Cup promotions

Jessica M. Pasko's weekly column returns with news of Santa Cruz County getting more than half a million from pharmacy giant Walgreens and local businesses' chance to get in on World Cup fever, plus names, numbers and dates to know.

Apr 8 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • lookout.co

How the Journal Covered Trump’s 12-Hour Iran ‘Civilization’ Countdown

Plus, the White House decided to hang on to Kristi Noem’s $70 million jet.

Apr 8 • 6:58 AM EDT • Politics • wsj.com

How the Navy's retail business is working to pull off a turnaround

Sales have fallen at the Navy Exchange, the government-owned department store chain that provides tax-free products to enlisted servicemembers and veterans. Its stores are an important benefit to military families stationed across the world, and its profits directly improve the welfare of Navy sailors. The company is working to revamp its fleet of stores with a planned investment of around $100 million to better compete with major e-commerce players like Walmart and Amazon.

Apr 8 • 6:55 AM EDT • Business • cnbc.com

$9M 24-acre Jay park renovation will include sports complex, disaster hub

A $9.1 million upgrade of Jay park will include full-scale sports complex, playground, outdoor workout area and a disaster response hub.

Apr 8 • 5:06 AM EDT • Sports • pnj.com

Plastic bags infest the Kansas prairie, degrading and threatening our health. We can change course.

Every year, Americans use more than 100 billion plastic bags, and most are used for just 12 minutes. The problem? Those bags don’t disappear.

Apr 8 • 4:33 AM EDT • Health • kansasreflector.com

The ‘oldest fossil octopus’ is probably another animal

In 2000, researchers thought they found the oldest fossil octopus, which lived over 300 million years ago. But it may just be a half-rotten nautilus.

Apr 7 • 7:01 PM EDT • Science • sciencenews.org

Maryville Entertainment Pavilion work underway

By Kathy Turner • Work is progressing on the new American Legion Entertainment Pavilion at Fireman’s Park in Maryville. Boeker Construction Company was awarded the bid for the project and had a milder-than-usual February and March to thank for the progress. The pavilion will be the setting for many activities and concerts at the park…

Apr 7 • 7:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • timestribunenews.com