In a closely watched New York Democratic primary in June, centrist George Latimer ousted incumbent Jamaal Bowman by a wide margin of 58.7% to 41.3%.
Ahead of the vote, two 19-year-old college dropouts in Manhattan conducted a poll that accurately predicted the results within 371 votes. Their secret? They didn’t survey a single person. Instead, they asked thousands of AI chatbots which candidate they preferred.
Welcome to the future of polling, according to Cam Fink and Ned Koh, co-founders of a seven-person company called Aaru. They say they’ve cracked the code for predicting accurate election results, which have come under increasing fire since most public polls failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. The answer is ignoring the humans whose behavior they are trying to capture.
For election results, Aaru uses census data to replicate voter districts, creating AI agents essentially programmed to think like the voters they are copying. Each agent is given hundreds of personality traits, from their aspirations to their family relationships. The agents are constantly surfing the internet and gathering information meant to mimic the media diets of the humans they’re replicating, which sometimes causes them to change their voting preferences.
For instance, when Donald Trump was shot during an attempted assassination, a large chunk of Aaru’s agents immediately switched voting preferences to support the former president. But as more information came out about the shooter in the hours after the attack, many of them switched back.
The polls usually draw on responses from around 5,000 AI respondents, and it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 1.5 minutes to conduct. Aaru charges less than 1/10th the cost of a survey of humans.
“No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” Fink said in an interview with Semafor. “There are massive issues when you’re using real people. You never know if someone is telling the truth.”
He said the company has been hired to conduct polls for Fortune 500 companies, political campaigns, think tanks and super political action committees. One campaign in California is relying mainly on Aaru for its polling, he said.
In one survey, the company noticed that one of the AI agents said it was going to vote for Mickey Mouse in the upcoming presidential election. Fearing one of their bots had gone off the rails, the Aaru team investigated. It turned out the bot had an explanation. “The agent’s response was ‘I hate Kamala and I hate Trump. I’m writing in and voting for Mickey Mouse,’” Fink said.
