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.
Yep, this is patently absurd and doesn’t tell you much about humans only that western thought is so flattened an AI can come up with answers just about perfectly.