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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25986 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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More in AI skepticism news: Turns out most AI benchmarks are bullshit!

https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/trustworthy-benchmarks-cont/

Specifically the following benchmarks are trivially exploitable: SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld, GAIA, Terminal-Bench, FieldWorkArena, and CAR-bench.

I don't have too much to add to this, but I'll try. Assuming this paper isn't bullshit itself, it makes you wonder why no one was looking more closely at the results submitted by various AI companies. In one of our other discussions about this recently, someone said:

A team member did a full matrix test on models implementing solutions to multiple problems and then evaluated all implementations with said models. In the experiment, 5.4 was the undefeated and universal victor: 5.4 and 4.6 always preferred 5.4’s solutions.

When I asked if they had manually verified them, they said they hadn't. It seems a lot of the things people claim about AI and its capabilities are "too good to verify", similar to how salacious stories about the other tribe in culture war stories are "too good to verify". It seems to me that a lot of people want to believe that AGI, or the death of software development, or similar things, are right around the corner. As a result, they often believe whatever the claims of sociopaths like Sam Altman, or the weirdos who believe in AGI over at Anthropic, tell them. Including, potentially, the benchmark results we see published with every new release. On the other hand, to be fair, skeptics like me can certainly be quick to believe negative stories about AI. I mean, look at me rushing to post this negative story about it here.

Regardless, I am personally of the opinion that we are near a breaking point regarding AI. I think either the bubble is going to pop and a lot of the things people claimed AI was going to take over aren't going to materialize, or they are an we are in for some major economic disruption. I don't think "AGI" is around the corner in either case though. And certain professions like SEO slop writer, translator, and others are definitely disrupted forever regardless.

Along with this, Silver Bulletin has a piece out about synthetic polls - very basically, companies use data to get AI to simulate responses to questions. Then sell that to companies who seem to use it unquestioningly - or at least without making it clear that the 'respondents' to the 'poll' were not people:

Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels.

It's one thing if companies like McDonalds test new products out on fake polls - the worst that can happen is they try selling a new burger that the customers won't buy. But if it comes to governments or public health authorities making decisions on 'data' gathered from fake polls, I do worry. A maternal mortality poll using synthetic polling?

But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all.

Do you ask the AI "did you die from being pregnant?" and it comes back "Oh yes, I've had six kids and died after every birth"? Okay, that's a ridiculous exaggeration, but this is not real data from real people, and that isn't really trustworthy when you're using it to make claims like "Maternal mortality in the United States has more than doubled over the past four decades, a reversal that no strong and prosperous nation should accept" and putting forward solutions based, at least in part, on the fake responses.

The Axios story here, and even the NYT has a criticism of it here:

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.

I think we are on the way to implementing Brecht's satire: dissolve the people and elect another!

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

And our theme song as we merrily stroll down the primrose path will be this:

Her green plastic watering can
For a fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

"Synthetic polling" is of course completely invalid, no better than "we made it up". But note it isn't even new with AI. You know those "studies" that say hiring managers are more likely to hire people with a name indicating one race over another? Some of them were done by polling college students asked to play the part of hiring managers.

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