Episode 28: LLMs Are Not Human Subjects, March 4 2024

Alex and Emily put on their social scientist hats and take on the churn of research papers suggesting that LLMs could be used to replace human labor in social science research -- or even human subjects. Why these writings are essentially calls to fabricate data.

References:

PNAS: ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks

• Beware the Hype: ChatGPT Didn't Replace Human Data Annotators
• ChatGPT Can Replace the Underpaid Workers Who Train AI, Researchers Say

Political Analysis: Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples

Behavioral Research Methods: Can large language models help augment English psycholinguistic datasets?

Information Systems Journal: Editorial: The ethics of using generative AI for qualitative data analysis

Fresh AI Hell:

Advertising vs. reality, synthetic Willy Wonka edition

• https://x.com/AlsikkanTV/status/1762235022851948668?s=20
• https://twitter.com/CultureCrave/status/1762739767471714379
• https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1762891492476006491?t=bNQ1AQlju36tQYxnm8BPVQ&s=19

A news outlet used an LLM to generate a story...and it falsely quoted Emily

• AI Invents Quote From Real Person in Article by Bihar News Site: A Wake-Up Call?

Trump supporters target Black voters with faked AI images

• Seeking Reliable Election Information? Don’t Trust AI

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Alex

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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.