Great, so now they're outsourcing our own fucking opinions to them

You know what else costs a fraction of traditional polling and takes a fraction of the time?

Lying, making shit up. Which conveniently is basically what AI slop does, and having a person lie is even cheaper than licensing some random AI to do it.

Ah, yes, lies.

That's fucking stupid.

I could go even cheaper by just thinking about it really hard and guessing

I have an environment friendly alternative to this method. It involves tea leaves…

Is there a community for cataloging tech bullshit like "silicon sampling"? If not I'll make one. First thought c/techbrobabble

EDIT: 'tis done !techbrobabble@piefed.blahaj.zone

It costs less to make shit up that "mimics" the real information. Who would have thought

Any scientific publications accidentally posting an article not based on the actual scientific method should be immediately punished by law or we are lost. It's time they used the hordes of money they accumulated during the easy part to now prove themselves and perform their actual function in society.

What the actual fuck??

“opinions” formed from a mix of stolen books and movie scripts, terminally online shutins and fanfic writers, and politics comment sections cannot be considered a holistic look at humanity.

We’re absolutely going extinct. I’m out of hope at this point.

Ever notice that they're just doing what Clavicular or whatever his name is doing? They're inventing lingo to sound like its not bullshit.

Its not hitting yourself with a hammer its looksmaxxing. Its not standing around being a dork, its mogging. Its not a context window, its the chat scrollback. Its not asking chatgpt its "silicon sampling".

They're making it seem legit by making its own terminology and in-group lingo.

Bullshit artists.

Unfucking believable that a legitimate media outlet would do such a thing. That’s some Breitbart shit.

Sadly, I'm not too surprised. Check this shit out, published back in November 2025: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137.

"We simulated 151 million American workers [using LLMs] to see what proportion of tasks they do that can also be done by AI".

Much more recently, Esquire couldn't get ahold of an actor for an interview and so decided to generate the actors responses using Claude: https://esquiresg.com/mackenyu-one-piece-roronoa-zoro-interview/.

We had the photospread, but nothing directly uttered by the 29-year-old. With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses.

Are these the words we expect from Mackenyu? Or are they just replies from an echo chamber of celebrity-hood that we want to believe is from him?

With the absence of information, can new insights be gained?

Nature abhors a vacuum, and in its place, a story fills the hollow.

Somehow it is currently accepted by a certain portion of people that LLM-based systems can be used to replace actually existing human beings.

Making shit up, but with extra steps.

This might be the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Misleading title, Axios did not do this, but rather the referenced a study that they later discovered did this.

It’s on them for not learning this sooner, but let’s not act like they’re the ones who sent it up to try and manipulate political reporting.

You wouldn’t know my survey results, she goes to another school

Cool, so everything is just fucking made up now. Why even bother with the AI at that point? Just make up stats that say what you want right there on the spot. Its the same fucking different. Bullshit from humans or bullshit from AI, its all still bullshit.

Holy fuck. It can simulate large samplings or it can just hallucinate some nonsensical BS that completely misinterprets the data it gathers in order to agree with the phrasing of the person who created the prompt.

Do the majority of people trust their doctors and nurses? Maybe. Or, maybe it depends on the context of the question.

Do I trust my doctors and nurses are a better source of information than random internet advice and AI generated slop? I would hope so.

Do I trust that the American healthcare system is set up to prioritize the health and well-being of the patient over maximizing profits and forcing healthcare workers to adhere to standardized time allotments of 10 to 15 minutes for every patient interaction regardless of the individual case? Absolutely not.

Why bother asking people when you can just ask AI to make answers.

The thing is, logically the distribution of opinions or individual situations/beliefs which lead to those opinions, has been baked into the model when the data used to train it was captured, which means that at best and if the entire principle of the thing works (which itself isn't mathematically proven in any way form or shape) they're still getting only poll results for the past and which will not actually change beyond some random noise until the next time data is captured and the model is retrained.

It's like repeatedly using an old picture of a street to make realtime claims about the traffic there.

Kinda sounds like numbers pulled out of your ass…

Sure, our polls mean nothing, but think about the money you can save!!!

I've read a lot of fucked up shit in the last few years - that's the first time I've thrown my phone in response!

(My phone's fine - I just threw it onto the sofa beside me, but still..)

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.

So, use AI to just make shit up, then report that as information? I wouldn't expect anything less in our post-truth era. However, come on Axios, I thought you were better than that.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well this might go a ways in explaining why polling has been so off in the last few years.

Crossposting to fuck_ai if you don't mind.

63% of all statistics are made up on the spot

Tempted to start a AI survey company, only take big corp customers. Then always give them the opposite of intended survey results I assume they want.

Really if its fuckin "AI" doing the survey why even go through to steps. Just make some graphs, demographic breakdowns and what not, then let a random number generator do the rest. Don't even need gen ai.

Their enshittification was inevitable once they were acquired by Cox media

GFC.

Surprisingly unrelated to the recently compromised npm package.

I relate to these the same as almost any poll.

This is dumb. But, there's a hint of an interesting idea in there. If LLMs sample all human text and produce statistical averages from it, there's a sense in which they contain a statistically average opinion.

It's basically like how if you use Google to search for "how many calories are there in a" it will suggest the next word. The word it suggests is the statistically average way to finish that sentence. That also means it's the food item for which people most want to know the calories. At least, it's the item they most type into a Google search box. It's just matching text patterns, but it reveals something about people that say a fast food company might find useful.

If you scale up the population of humanity to 8 trillion people and have thousands of years of data in these LLMs, maybe you actually do get useful insights about what people care about. And, maybe that's how you get psychohistory from Asimov's foundation series.