Researchers Try Using AI Chatbots to Conduct Interviews for Social Science Studies

As the legislative election in France approached this summer, a research team decided to reach out to hundreds of citizens to interview them about their views on key issues. But the interviewer asking the questions wasn’t a human researcher — it was an AI chatbot.To prepare ChatGPT to take on this role, the researchers started by prompting the AI bot to behave as it has observed professors communicating in its training data. The specific prompt, according to a paper published by the researchers, was: “You are a professor at one of the world’s leading research universities, specializing in qualitative research... [Read more...]