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Using atomic nuclei could allow scientists to read time more precisely than ever
Most clocks, from wristwatches to the systems that run GPS and the internet, work by tracking regular, repeating motions.
Lucky 8, Sharp Entertainment Producers Ratify Labor Contracts
Nonfiction television staffers at the production companies behind ‘90 Day Fiancé’ and ‘The Food That Built America’ have greenlit new three-year labor deals.
Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture.”
How AI cameras are changing video capture in youth sports
XbotGo reports that AI cameras are transforming youth sports video capture, making it easier for families to record games without distraction.
Toilet tech is the next frontier of health data — but it might mean putting a camera on your bowl
The Post tried three of the latest toilet health trackers to see if they're worth opening your wallet — and your bathroom door.
WIAA spring sports season opens with questions for area teams
Can Kaukauna softball, Xavier girls soccer, Freedom girls track defend their state titles? Here are 9 questions heading into the spring sports season.
2026 WNBA Draft: How much will No. 1 overall pick Azzi Fudd make in her rookie season with the Dallas Wings?
Rookie contracts are richer than ever thanks to the new collective bargaining agreement
WECT INVESTIGATES: Hampstead business owner faces felony charge, state investigation
A Hampstead pool contractor faces a felony charge after accusations of taking customers' money and not finishing projects.
Vote for Blue FCU's Fort Collins-area Girls Athlete of Week (April 13)
Vote for Blue FCU Girls Athlete of the Week, with nominees from Rocky tennis, PSD lacrosse, Timnath track & field and Fossil Ridge soccer/track.
Earth Day forum to explore climate solutions through business and policy in San Francisco
Earth Day arrives next week. Amid global distractions, a local public forum plots new strategies for tackling climate change. The World Meteorological
iPhone Fold Production Pushed Back, But Fall 2026 Launch Still on Track
Production on the iPhone Fold is behind schedule, but the device is still slated to launch in fall 2026, reports DigiTimes. The site says that production has been pushed back by "roughly one to two months," but Apple has not communicated any launch delays to suppliers. Apple is still planning for a 2026 launch, which suggests a tighter production schedule. Apple planned to begin iPhone Fold mass production in June 2026, but mass production has now slipped to early August.
Antiseptic-tolerant germs spread through the air in hospitals, early study hints
Trace amounts of antiseptic chemicals in hospital rooms may be driving tolerance and resistance in bacteria, a study finds.
Epic Games Reportedly Developing Extraction Shooter Starring Disney Characters
Bloomberg reports that Epic Games is currently developing a Disney-themed extraction shooter as part of the studios' $1.5 billion partnership.
Contra Costa Health nurses demand Board of Supervisors stop drastic budget and service cuts
Registered nurses with the California Nurses Association will speak out at the Contra Costa Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, April 14, to demand that the board stop drastic budget cuts to save the Contra Costa Health system, maintain services, and retain nurses in the wake of the significant projected financial losses created by H.R. 1.
Julie’s new AI chatbot aims to fix a major gap in women’s health information
The emergency contraception brand is using a chatbot to answer the questions Gen Z is already asking online.
Top high school sports games of the week for April 13-19
See the top games of the week for April 13-19, including baseball, softball, track and field and more.
Pragmata On PC: Impressive From Path-Traced RTX 5090 Down To The Lowly 4060
Another hit from Capcom sets them up as the publisher of the generation.
NASA Night-light Imagery Tracks US Energy Transition, Global Volatility
New nighttime maps based on NASA satellite imagery are upending assumptions, revealing a world where artificial brightening and dimming have intensified over
Mystery Tarkov-Marathon Extraction Blend, ‘Fragmentary Order,’ Raises Questions
Fragmentary Order, already being called “Starkov” by many, debuted a seven-minute cinematic trailer yesterday, dropping from new studio Rant Gaming and publisher Cor3,
Former K-State Athletes Barratti, Leeper Named to KSHOF Class of 2026 - Kansas State University Athletics
In an announcement by the State of Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, former K-State standouts Bob Barratti (track and field) and Nathan Leeper (track and field) wi...
Venezuela hopes to lure back international miners, but it's a risky business
Venezuela's effort to attract foreign investors to develop its gold, iron and bauxite seams has enthusiastic backing from the Trump administration but faces big challenges, including armed groups with deep interests in the chaotic, largely illegal prospecting industry that has developed over the past 20 years, according to nine miners, residents and community activists who spoke to Reuters.
Tractor-trailer careens into building in Clifton, NJ
The big rig driver careened into Limo Ride, a business along Kensington Avenue and Route 3, just before 2:30 a.m.
Entertainment Is Now the Engine of Brand Growth, Small World Reports
Little Black Book, Produced with Tracksuit, the 'Entertain or Die 3.0' report reveals that entertainment-first brands are driving stronger revenue growth and consumer preference in 2025
Jersey Bulls Women stay on course for league title
Jersey Bulls Women keep their promotion ambitions on track with a 6-0 win over Hartland at Springfield.
Trump’s strait blockade risks another serious blow to the global economy
The failure of US-Iran peace talks leaves President Donald Trump with a set of unattractive options that are unlikely to hand him a decisive or swift victory.
NBA Awards eligibility tracker: Nikola Jokić qualifies in final game of season; complete list of ineligible players
BIZNOTE: After almost a quarter-century, Avalon Glassworks looking for new ownership for their unique West Seattle business
By Tracy Record West Seattle Blog editor More change is on the way for the heart of the Luna Park mini-business district. Shannon Felix and Jon Felix are looking for new ownership for Avalon Glassworks, which they've owned for 23 of its 33 years at 2914 SW Avalon Way. Their one-of-a-kind business - West Seattle's only commercial ...
Business leaders urge Stormont to delay workers' rights reforms
The Good Jobs Bill would give workers a range of enhanced rights including an effective ban on zero hour contracts.
Stormont urged to delay workers' rights reforms by business leaders
The Good Jobs Bill would give workers a range of enhanced rights including an effective ban on zero hour contracts.
Analysis: Rogers still has more to prove
Morgan Rogers is attracting a lot of attention and the growing expectation is he will leave Aston Villa in the summer. Villa will likely need to sell a star player, regardless of whether they qualify for the Champions League, and Rogers is their best asset - especially with Boubacar Kamara out injured. An impressive World Cup would also strengthen Villa's hand but the England forward needs to show more of a clinical nature throughout the pitch.
Staffing and pay concerns at the forefront of Sutter Health workers informational picket
Workers at Sutter Health hospitals in Northern California, including Sacramento, held an informational picket to highlight concerns about unsafe staffing and pay amid ongoing contract negotiations.
As WhatsApp faces lawsuit, Elon Musk launches 'no tracking' messaging app XChat
App will offer encrypted chats, voice and video calls, large group messaging and disappearing messages, initially for iPhone and iPad users only, with no ads or phone number required to sign up
Green Bay area high school sports results for Saturday, April 11
High school baseball, softball, soccer, track and field, and golf teams were in action.
Appleton area high school sports results for Saturday, April 11
High school baseball, softball, soccer, lacrosse, track and field, and golf teams were in action.
Arc Raiders Launches Map Conditions tracker - here's what the tracker tells us
Embark Studios has released a new tracker to help players monitor map conditions across Arc Raiders.
Anthropic brings Claude into Microsoft Word, and legal contract review leads its use cases
Anthropic's Claude for Word beta is live in Microsoft Word for Team and Enterprise users, with legal contract review as the tool's first listed use case
Fever reportedly re-sign Sophie Cunningham to 1-year contract
"Sweet blood doesn't attract mosquitoes: here is what actually attracts them according to science " - Futura-Sciences
At night, you hear the constant buzzing of a mosquito. By morning, there’s a fresh bite right on your cheek. Meanwhile, your partner slept peacefully through the night. During a walk with friends, you’re the one constantly swatting at tiny attacks on your legs, arms, and back. Like tiny vampires...
FULL SHOW: Inside INdiana Business 4/12/26
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Scientists Finally Crack the Mystery of Water’s Strangest Behavior After Decades of Research
A hidden transition between two forms of liquid water may explain its most puzzling properties.
EDITORIAL: Business HQs decamp from Colorado
Grim news last week: For the first time since the pandemic, Colorado’s job market lost 11,700 jobs — contracting at an annual rate of -0.4%. The Centennial State is among 27 states with year-over-year job losses, but a new report from the Colorado Chamber Foundation indicates Colorado-specific trends are at play. And they’re making things […]
EDITORIAL: Business HQs decamp from Colorado
Grim news last week: For the first time since the pandemic, Colorado’s job market lost 11,700 jobs — contracting at an annual rate of -0.4%. The Centennial State is among 27 states with year-over-year job losses, but a new report from the Colorado Chamber Foundation indicates Colorado-specific trends are at play. And they’re making things […]
Sutton's predictions: Sunderland v Tottenham
What's Roberto de Zerbi going to do with Tottenham and how will he set them up? The whole situation is just odd, with De Zerbi securing a five-year contract despite only hanging around for more than two years at one of his previous eight clubs. Sunderland's form at the Stadium of Light has dipped a bit since they lost their unbeaten home record against Liverpool in February, but the Black Cats will be buoyant after beating Newcastle last time out.
Democrats see gas prices as a potent political tool. Here’s the catch.
President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran sent gas prices surging, giving Democrats’ focus on affordability more traction if they can get voters to trust them.
Pulling Reports, Playing Politics
The CIA’s retraction of intelligence reports should raise concerns about politicization and the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric.
SPFL prepare for Old Firm play-off
The Scottish Professional Football League is preparing for a potential Old Firm Premiership play-off should the title race end in a deadlock between Rangers and Celtic. Daily Record) Lawrence Shankland looks increasingly likely to stay at Heart of Midlothian until the end of the 30-year-old Scotland striker's current contract despite long-standing interest in his signature from Rangers. (Football Insider)
Africa is losing health workers when it can least afford to – a pattern rooted in colonial history
Health workers consistently move from poorer countries to richer ones, a pattern that tracks closely along lines drawn by colonial history.
Sports Highlights
Chris Hayashi: Chris Hayashi, a senior on the Lake Oswego boys track team, put in one of the best efforts of the season during his team’s meet against Oregon City […]
🚨 Tigres v Chivas line-ups confirmed
Tigres hosts Chivas this afternoon at El Volcán in one of the most attractive matches of the weekend. Guido Pizarro’s side will look to take all three points from the league leaders, which would he...
ON THE JOB: “What is the Best Business Advice You’ve Ever Received?
Interviews by Deborah Jeanne Sergeant Sound advice can contribute to your success. We recently asked area business leaders, what was their best advice they’d ever received. Here’s what they said: “The best advice I ever received was from my then –boss, Gerry Church, Fulton plant manager at Miller Brewing Co. He told me that whenever I wanted to discuss a business problem or issue with him, I should also be prepared to offer possible solutions. It’s the difference between being proactive or reactive. It’s also the difference between being a leader or follower. That has served me well in any business relationship I have had since then.” — Stephen Chirello, Owner, Steve Chirello Advertising, Fulton “Someone will always do it for less; they will also take the most effort to service or satisfy and leave you for the next lower price.” — John M. Henry, Owner, Speedway Press, Mitchell Printing, Phoenix Press, Oswego “I’m going to answer this question by turning it around and giving my own advice that is, ‘Always treat every customer as if they were your only customer!’ We are celebrating our 50th anniversary in business this year. We started our business on March 25, 1976. My advice works.”” — Nick Chervinsky, President, Brewerton Pharmacy, Brewerton “’You need to toot your own horn, my grandfather, Howard D. Dice, told me.” — Beth Ann Dice, Women’s active aging and cancer recovery coach, Mission Movement Wellness Studio & Breast Cancer Recovery Studio, Fulton “In the micro enterprise class, they taught, ‘Get a good lawyer, accountant and bank.’ That was over 30 years ago and I still have those three today. I chose good people I could grow with.” — Tony Pauldine, Owner, Anthony M. Pauldine General Contractors Inc., Oswego “From my grandfather; ‘Listen to everyone! You never know where you will get the solution you need.’” — Kevin Dean, Executive director, Oswego County Opportunities, Fulton “‘Preparation is the mother of success.’ My dad always drilled that into my head growing up, and it has helped me avoid a lot of snags in both my personal and professional life. Thanks, Dad!” — Bekkah Frisch, Owner and president, iHeart Holdings, Inc., Fulton “If you don’t take a risk and try, you will never know.” — Justin Taber, Owner, Torbitt’s Service Center, Oswego “Be ready to take a loss.” — Cody Seymour, Manager, Damiano’s Eatery, Mexico “I’ve received so much good business advice over the years. When people are giving you advice, always be curious rather than judgmental. Follow your gut. Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing.” — Dana Decker, Principal owner/broker, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, Oswego ’Do it and figure it out later.’ It hasn’t failed me yet. Too many people take time to think about doing this and this and this and then the opportunity is over with. If it’s somewhat reasonable — if it’s not something outrageous — do it and figure it out later.” — Jeremy Allen, Licensed real estate salesperson, Acropolis Realty Group, Syracuse “’Try to meet the needs of the customer. Treat them like you’d like to be treated.’ It’s like the Golden Rule says.” — Douglas Dickson, Physician and associate at CNY Foot Surgery and Podiatry Care, East Syracuse “The best piece of business advice I’ve ever received applies to life in general: always be honest. Never overstate your capabilities and always be willing to ask questions. The more specific you can be in any given topic will always lead to a better outcome.” — Tom Fernandez, President, Woodbine Hospitality, Syracuse “As a business owner, the advice would be ‘Don’t overextend yourself. Especially in agriculture, expect issues to come up.’ If something is going right, it’s not true agriculture. This last season, we scaled very hard to field another crew. We got more drones, crew and generators based on projections. This last season hit the ag community hard with a very wet spring. We did 15,000 to 20,000 acres for fungicide and the same for cover crop seeding in 2024. We scaled to 25,000 to 30,000 for 2025. We ended up doing 2,000 for fungicide and 3,000 for cover crop seeding. That’s why that advice was good.” — Rick Jordan, Operations manager, CNY Drove Services, Clinton “’Keep your head down, mind your own business and do the best for your clients that you can do.’ It has a lot to do with my success in working for Galloway Century 21.” — Ed Fayette, New York state licensed real estate agent, Century 21 Galloway, Oswego “’Expand in all ways, always.’ It just keeps you going and keeps you growing.” — Stephen Baier, Licensed real estate person, The Real Estate Agency & Bouck Commercial, Auburn “The best advice is, ‘Your biggest asset you won’t see on the books because it comes from your employees.’” — David Flickinger, Owner, Edible Arrangements, Syracuse “Don’t take things personally when you’re working with the public.” — Leeann Desimone, Manager, Annie’s Hallmark Shop, Auburn “‘Follow up.’ The customer knows that you care about what you are doing and that their opinion counts. Sometimes they might be on the fence about whether they want to use your company. If they’re asking your opinion on things, they feel you are concerned about what you’re doing. They like to be kept in the loop if they’re spending money with you.” — Dorothy Casper, Saslesperson, SweetWoods Memorials, Phoenix “The best business advice I received is ‘Never be the smartest person in the room. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you.’ That’s how you learn.” — Debbie Bilello, Owner, Virtual Office Solutions, Central Square “’You need to grow your business but you can’t grow too big too fast.’ That’s what we’ve done at Pinnacle Maintenance. We’ve tried to grow but not too fast. Along those same lines, there’s another good piece of advice, ‘Don’t take on more than you can handle because it only leads to a bad name for your business and a bad experience for your customers.’ It goes along the same lines as growing your business slowly and carefully.” — David Wines, Owner, Pinnacle Maintenance, Central Square “Always be on time and do what you say you are going to do.’ I’ve done very well following that advice. Most of my work is referral and I don’t really do any advertising so I have a pretty good customer base. It’s mostly word-of-mouth from satisfied customers.” — Robert J. Fleming, Owner, Bob Fleming Windows & Doors, Brewerton “’Concentrate on your finances, always pay your taxes, and form a team you can depend on. Try to help the community you’re in as much as you can.’ We do all of these all the time here. We give and give and give to the community and the community gives back to us always.” — Susan Bonnet, Co-owner, Bonnet Sales and Service, Central Square “Keep smiling. It brings a positive attitude to the workplace.” — Karin Lindsley, Vice president, DTS Truck Service, Syracuse “‘Customer service above all.’ Following this advice has served us very well.’ — Guy Fox, Owner, Fox’s Discount Parts, West Monroe “The best thing to do is to make sure you’re taking in more money than you’re spending. I wish I could say I’m a good businessman but I have been in business since 1981. I’m not a bean counter but work well with my hands and its’s served me well all these years and I am still in business.” — Matt McGill, Owner, Matt McGill Collision, Brewerton
College basketball transfer portal tracker: Fit grades for every top commitment from the 2026 cycle
Tracking and grading the major commitments as the 2026 college basketball transfer portal season heats up
Epic set to release Arc Raiders-like extraction shooter with Disney characters by the end of the year
Epic Games will allegedly release an Arc Raiders-like shooter later this year.
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
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Sports reporter Brian Calloway is among the busiest people at the LSJ almost anytime of the year. That's especially true this time of year.
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