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Axios used AI to fake an opinion poll (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html

No paywall: https://archive.ph/oR5U2

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[–] 13 points 7 months ago (1 child)

The ideal would be that clients who actually want useful information will stop paying the pollsters for their useless crap.

The reality will be that slack will be more than picked up by people who want sham poll results to back up their agenda.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    Polls have always been leveraged as a form of propaganda.

    We had Push Polling from back during the early Bush Era, where the ostensible polling cold call was just a marketing tool. We had "Unskewed Polls" during the Obama/Romney election, wherein Republicans tried to insist they were far more popular in order to influence everyone else through bandwagon appeal. Polling about Transgender Athletes was used as an excuse to dismantle civil protections for the LGBTQ community. Polls online are used to gather information on the public through responses and attendant metadata. Call-in shows are a form of engagement bait.

    You can talk about the useful information gleaned from a public survey. But by and large, we only take polls when we want to change people's opinions. Its the first step in market research that ends with a blizzard of advertisements.

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