Commentary

Synthesizing Human Experience

As someone who has closely covered media and marketing research for nearly half a century, one of the most surprising recent developments has been the use of artificial intelligence to synthesize human experiences that are becoming the basis for humans (advertisers, planners, buyers, etc.) to make decisions on what, when …

4 comments about "Synthesizing Human Experience".
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  1. Joshua Chasin from KnotSimpler, October 13, 2025 at 2:28 p.m.

    I've said this before, but I find it ironic that we spent years endeavoring to keep machine-generated respondents out of our surveys. Now we rely on them.

  2. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., October 13, 2025 at 2:40 p.m.

    @Joshua Chasin: I can't wait until the MRC releases standards for filtering invalid human traffic.

  3. Rick Miller from Big Chalk, October 13, 2025 at 4:50 p.m.

    Synthetic is fine - until you have to test something the AI models have yet to be trained on... The danger is, when you use an AI audience for that testing application, you'll still get results...

  4. Max Kalehoff from MAK replied, October 15, 2025 at 11:20 a.m.

    @joshchasin Usually it's pornographers and bad actors that leverage technology first to their advantage. Performance-oriented growth and curious test-quickly-and-learn marketers also tend to adopt early. Conversely, survey insights professionals are often the most skeptical and risk-averse group, loyal to ivory-tower-validated protocol, and are late to adopting innovative techniques. (Not always, but often if not mostly.) Eventually the latter group comes along for the ride to remain relevant and exploit the competetive advantage. In the more narrow case of bots masquerading as people in insights surveys, you definitely can only fight AI bot fraud with AI detection, because AI emulates humans better than fraudulent humans (as Steve Millman conceded at The ARF AxS conference a few years ago). Cheers, amigo!

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