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

@jmcrookston @Natasha_Jay indeed, wtf. People won't answer the right way for our click bait, let's get an LLM to invent/juice some numbers for us

@Natasha_Jay

You know what? I can make shit up too and I'll do it cheaper than an AI company.

@Natasha_Jay TIL I didn't cheat on a college statistics project, I was a pioneer of "silicon sampling".

@Natasha_Jay Ugh.

Do you happen to have the source link for that handy? Would like to read the rest and possibly breathlessly share elsewhere.

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

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

@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.

@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.

@Natasha_Jay idiotic is a mild take imo

@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?

@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.

@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.

@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

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