AI can't replace polling

Using AI models such as ChatGPT to mimic human respondents betrays the public and provides inaccurate answers to key questions

In Isaac Asimov’s 1955 short story “FRANCHISE,” a dystopian future America (set in 2008) has turned into an “electronic democracy” where a supercomputer called Multivac replaces the need for people to vote. Each year, Multivac selects one citizen — the mathematically most representative person in America, according to its “billions” of data points — to be the “Voter of the Year.” Multivac conducts an extensive interview with this individual and uses the answers to predict the votes of every other American. Multivac then assigns the winners of every elected office in the country, with no actual votes being cast; the opinions of every voter are inferred from a single interview.

We are edging toward this dystopia Asimov imagined — not (yet) for democracy, but for public opinion polling. Over the past year, several AI startups have begun using large language models (such as ChatGPT) as a stand-in for human interviewees in products they call “AI polls.” One New York-based company, Aaru, gen…