Using AI Predictions to Augment Rather Than Replace Surveys

Abstract

LLMs can predict human survey responses with nontrivial accuracy. What this means for the future of social surveys remains hotly contested. Optimists anticipate a coming era of synthetic respondents; skeptics see a fragile and overhyped substitute. This article advocates a position: AI predictions cannot replace surveys, but they can augment them. Using prediction-powered inference (PPI), a statistical framework rooted in survey methodology and known in sociology as "mixed subjects design", the study tests whether AI predictions can improve the statistical efficiency of social surveys when combined with census-scale auxiliary information. Applying the framework to 83 social outcomes in the General Social Survey (GSS) and National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), with American Community Survey (ACS) being the auxiliary file, we find that supervised predictors yield effective-sample-size gains of about 7-12 percent when estimating the mean, while LLM gains are smaller but positive.