Instead of asking humans who they would vote for, try to understand the nuances of their thoughts and concerns, let those messages bubble up to candidates so they can adjust their campaign to meet voters’ demand, instead of that, why not just segment humans into a bunch of shallow stereotypes (the socialist Millennial, the conservative Boomer, the liberal city dweller, the rancorous rural voter who feels left behind…) and then have some AI agents replicate how those people would respond?
Surely nothing could go wrong.
Honestly it makes about as much sense as calling people on the phone, barking a long series of questions at the ones who answer, taking the numbers you get from that and multiplying them out by a big set of coefficients to “correct” for how badly off the numbers you got last time were compared to the reality, and then reporting what comes out of that with a margin for error of 2.5% (and reporting it as news anyway if someone’s ahead within even that purely fantastical error bar).
When I dug into a bunch of recent elections and the polls that attempted to predict them, the polls wound up being off by an average of 16 percentage points.
I agree. If the choice is between phone polls and ai from Reddit, the ai at least might surface something they didn’t already think of. What they do with the information is still up to the party/candidates and still likely to be fuck-all since they didn’t really want your opinion anyway.
Au contraire, this approach is guaranteed to give you stale answers and no real introspection.