I just consulted 54 trillion "people" who agree that this is idiotic.

[natasha_jay@tech.lgbt]

@HerraBRE
Paywalled but this -
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html

[tshirtman@mas.to]

@HerraBRE @Natasha_Jay luckied on it https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html

[johnzajac@dice.camp]

@Natasha_Jay

"But-!" exclaim all the people who are still trying to convince us that LLMs aren't just absolute poisonous garbage technology.

Also, re: the title of that NYT article - don't threaten me with a good time.

[cora@hachyderm.io]

@Natasha_Jay @quinn Holy crap, this is the first time I've heard of this.

I once worked as a developer with a team attempting to use ML for a non-invasive medical diagnostic device. The training data we had were... bad. Inconsistent, low quality, heavily class biased, and overall quite scarce.

I had to peace out when the CEO founder insisted that the answer was data synthesis—that we should just make random data with the same statistical distributions as existing data to even out class representation, and was completely bewildered at pushback that this was ludicrous.

I think I just heard him orgasm upon learning of silicon sampling.

[kierkegaanks@beige.party]

@Natasha_Jay idiotic is a mild take imo

[seconduniverse@autistics.life]

@Natasha_Jay I tossed a coin to decide whether to invest in in this AI startup.

But then I realized that wasn't very scientific, so I tossed a million coins and went with the majority decision.

I think I could scale this to answering the "hard" questions in physics or economics by scaling up to a trillion coins. That's a lot of coins, so possibly I will replace them with what I call "soft coins" which only exist only as memory addresses in the cloud.

Alternately, we can scale down to just a few hundred coins that we can trap in a chaotic air vortex. We'll image the coins millions of times per second, emulating a large mass roll but in a more compact form that we can scale to an almost unlimited extent. We'll call it the Certainty Engine. Once we reach 20 petaflips we should have effective certainty on any question. Does god exist? Is the meaning of life 42?

[dsdj3147@mastodon.social]

@Natasha_Jay
We are so F*cked!
We’re watching the death of facts & truth.

The “New Dark Ages” leading to an extinction event
Have commenced.

[bit101@mstdn.social]

@Natasha_Jay I'm not the biggest Asimov fan, but he nailed it on this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)

Why stop at polling? Our AI predicts that most people would vote for a 3rd Trump term. OK, he's in.

[robo105@mastodon.social]

@Natasha_Jay Silicone sampling tells us what AI wants us to believe but nothing about humans. It probably makes money so it will be a growing concern

[xgebi@hachyderm.io]

@Natasha_Jay great, so they are iterating on synthetic users...

[rapsneezy@mastodon.social]

@Natasha_Jay

voting in a democracy is so wasteful

much more efficient to leave to AI to decide how we might vote

#AI #tech #democracy

[jaykass@mastodon.online]

@Natasha_Jay
“AI” is breaking everyone.

How do they not understand?!

[octothorpe@mastodon.online]

@Natasha_Jay @catsalad I just sampled the 3 million voices in my head and they agree.

[jackemled@furry.engineer]

@Natasha_Jay I want to pour water on their GPUs so badly.

[aadeacon@mastodon.social]

@rapsneezy @Natasha_Jay Do not give the GOP ideas...Please

[dougiec3@libretooth.gr]

@Natasha_Jay
This is going to end badly for politicians.

[aadeacon@mastodon.social]

@Natasha_Jay In the words of Anthony Newley "Stop the world. I want to get off"

[tzafrir@tooot.im]

@Natasha_Jay
Original article seems to be:
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/19/olivia-walton-heartland-forward-maternal-health

I'm not sure where the link with the words "silicon sampling" pointed to.

[ohir@social.vivaldi.net]

@jawarajabbi @Natasha_Jay
> I can make shit up too and I'll do it cheaper than an AI

No and no. Was falsifying the raw material so easy no single person could catch it and get dissertations retracted.

And if you want to fill out 1,008 questionnaires for $100 I think I might have a gig for ya

[gainfullydozy@mastodon.online]

@Natasha_Jay So they'll assemble these "models" from essentially "fossilized" pre-slop human-generated data, fold in reams of more recent gen-AI-slop, cram that all into black boxes owned and run by sociopathic billionaires, and use the output to make major decisions affecting the lives of millions/billions?

Seems fine, what could POSSIBLY immediately and irrevocably go wrong for almost all of us?