As far as I understand this, they seem to think that AI models trained on a set of affluent westerners with unknown biases can be told to “act like [demographic] and answer these questions.”
It sounds completely bonkers not only from a moral perspective, but scientifically and statistically this is basically just making up data and hoping everyone is impressed by how complicated the data faking is to care.
I heard a comment this morning about AI that I’ll paraphrase: AI doesn’t give human responses. It gives what is has been told are human responses.
So, there will be selection bias inherent in the chat bot based off what text you have trained it on. The responses to your questions will be different if you’ve trained it on media from say a religious forum vs 4Chan. You can very easily make your study data say exactly what you want it to say depending on which chat bot you use. This can’t possibly go wrong. /S