No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans
In a closely watched New York Democratic primary in June, centrist George Latimer ousted incumbent Jamaal Bowman by a wide margin of 58.7% to 41.3%.
Ahead of the vote, two 19-year-old college dropouts in Manhattan conducted a poll that accurately predicted the results within 371 votes. Their secret? They didn’t survey a single person. Instead, they asked thousands of AI chatbots which candidate they preferred.
Welcome to the future of polling, according to Cam Fink and Ned Koh, co-founders of a seven-person company called Aaru. They say they’ve cracked the code for predicting accurate election results, which have come under increasing fire since most public polls failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. The answer is ignoring the humans whose behavior they are trying to capture.
For election results, Aaru uses census data to replicate voter districts, creating AI agents essentially programmed to think like the voters they are copying. Each agent is given hundreds of personality traits, from their aspirations to their family relationships. The agents are constantly surfing the internet and gathering information meant to mimic the media diets of the humans they’re replicating, which sometimes causes them to change their voting preferences.
