The Sims used for public opinion research

[Free]

That's basically what the news headline should be.

An AI Company Apparently Inspired by ‘the Sims’ Wants to Revolutionize Public Opinion Research

Figuring out what people think and feel is hard. But what if you just use digitally simulated people?

gizmodo.com

The reputation of public opinion polls is not in a good place right now—or at least it wasn’t right before the 2024 election, and it’s hard to imagine the situation has improved much. A new company recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal is asking the bold question, hey, what if we just replaced all that with AI?

It’s called Simile, and it was just awarded $100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, the Journal says.

According to its website, Simile claims to be “developing a foundation model that predicts human behavior in any situation, at any scale.”

I can see this turning out badly.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Joon Park, told the Journal how this works in a little more detail. Apparently AI agents are trained on chat-style interviews with actual people, at which point the agents become “digital twins” or “digital clones” of their human counterparts. Actual data from people’s behaviors and consumer habits are added to make sure the clones are accurate. Then, market insights can then be derived—ostensibly at least—by having market researchers talk to or poll those “clones.”

Hugely, extremely badly.

 

[Soen Eber]

That's basically what the news headline should be.

An AI Company Apparently Inspired by ‘the Sims’ Wants to Revolutionize Public Opinion Research

Figuring out what people think and feel is hard. But what if you just use digitally simulated people?

gizmodo.com

I can see this turning out badly.


Hugely, extremely badly.

Sounds like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy ... complete with coffee cup stains, annotations, that smudged bit where a past copy was creased and smudged from rough handling ...

This will end well.

 

[Free]

Coffee cup stains without ever having drank a cup of coffee. I hate this timeline.

 

[Noodles]

Its also stupid because it fails to account for the part where tastes change opinions change.

But then these types hate that almost as much as they hate having to pay people. If people woukd stop changing they could have this lerfrct machine where money just comes out the other end.