A recent Axios story on maternal health policy referred to “findings” that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. On the surface, there’s nothing unusual about that. What wasn’t originally mentioned, however, was that these findings were made up.
Clicking through the links revealed (as did a subsequent editor’s note and clarification by Axios) that the public opinion poll was a computer simulation run by the artificial intelligence start-up Aaru. No people were involved in the creation of these opinions.
The practice Aaru used is called silicon sampling, and it’s suddenly everywhere. The idea behind silicon sampling is simple and tantalizing. Because large language models can generate responses that emulate human answers, polling companies see an opportunity to use A.I. agents to simulate survey responses at a small fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html
This is polling via Yelp reviews. The loudest folks are usually those with a complaint.
So when LLMs are fed the internet and more to use as a filter to the lowest common denominator, and the internet mainly reflects one side of an argument because the other side has better things to do, well, how’s that gonna turn out?