A letter-writer in Tuesday’s WSJ Letters section thinks he sees a use for AI in improving the quality of political polls, which for the last several years have been badly off the mark both in prediction election winners and in predicting the margins of victory when they did get the winner right.
He’s sort of right, and he’s wrong.
It [AI] can help researchers reach a more representative mix of people, examine results faster and track changes in opinion more often.
AI can certainly speed up “examinations” of results if it’s properly trained on truly balanced techniques. That, though, requires humans being diligent about scrubbing as much as possible their own biases, with those humans involved in the training coming from a variety of political bents so as to counterbalance remaining biases. This is a requirement too often honored in the lack.
Additionally, researchers already know how to reach a more representative sample. However, they’ve been, instead, deliberately oversampling one party over others in order to reach a predetermined outcome. AI will not address that; it cannot correct it if it could address it.
Finally, there’s not much need to track opinion changes more frequently than is already done; most of us already have polling fatigue and are not interested in being confronted by even more polls, even if we just decline to participate.
In the end, all AI is likely to do, at least until we get better trained human oversight, is speed up the rate at which the polls get the politics wrong.