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ChatGPT vs. Social Surveys: Probing Objective and Subjective Silicon Population (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Mar 18, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Repeatedly asking GPT survey questions reveals the imaginary population its answers come from and compares it with real U.S. respondents. Its gender and average age match the 2020 U.S. population, but it overrepresents Black and highly educated people and answers more predictably than humans.

Abstract · ChatGPT vs Social Surveys: Probing Objective and Subjective Silicon Population

Recent discussions about Large Language Models (LLMs) indicate that they have the potential to simulate human responses in social surveys and generate reliable predictions, such as those found in political polls. However, the existing findings are highly inconsistent, leaving us uncertain about the population characteristics of data generated by LLMs. In this paper, we employ repeated random sampling to create sampling distributions that identify the population parameters of silicon samples generated by GPT. Our findings show that GPT's demographic distribution aligns with the 2020 U.S. population in terms of gender and average age. However, GPT significantly overestimates the representation of the Black population and individuals with higher levels of education, even when it possesses accurate knowledge. Furthermore, GPT's point estimates for attitudinal scores are highly inconsistent and show no clear inclination toward any particular ideology. The sample response distributions exhibit a normal pattern that diverges significantly from those of human respondents. Consistent with previous studies, we find that GPT's answers are more deterministic than those of humans. We conclude by discussing the concerning implications of this biased and deterministic silicon population for making inferences about real-world populations.

Muzhi Zhou, Lu Yu, Xiaomin Geng, Lan Luo
arXiv:2409.02601 · cs.CY · submitted Sep 4, 2024 · updated Mar 6, 2025
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