So there's a company which offers "synthetic users" for user testing products.[1] Apparently, social science researchers have been using things like that for th

So there's a company which offers "synthetic users" for user testing products.[1] Apparently, social science researchers have been using things like that for their research. It's a low-cost alternative to paying real people to answer surveys. Sort of pretend social science research. That seems to be the real problem. The paper is about why this is bad from the viewpoint of identity politics. It's probably bad from other viewpoints, too. It's discouraging that anyone thought that asking questions of LLMs was good social science research. [1] https://www.syntheticusers.com/ https://www.syntheticusers.com/