By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026Leek went to enormous lengths to reproduce the traits that make people interesting to study in aggregate, painstakingly replicating the ways that social connections, psychological outlook and demographic factors predict people's beliefs. 58/ 1280
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026The result was a set of LLM personas with "elaborate stories" about how they differed from one another, but whose survey responses about planned actions were homogeneous in a way that real populations are not. 59/ 2381
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026This, Leek writes, is the same force that homogenizes other data-driven predictors. Because she'd ordered her LLM to reproduce the statistically validated relationships between different factors that predict a person's beliefs, each synthetic persona was a homogenized average. 60/ 1310
