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Previous: Overview of AI Tools
“Synthetic participants and facilitators” refers to AI agents (e.g., chatbots) that are designed to emulate a user persona (participant) or facilitate a stakeholder engagement activity (facilitator). Synthetic participants or users are AI-generated profiles that attempt to imitate a person or group programmed around a set of characteristics, in lieu of talking to real people with those characteristics. These AI-generated personas can be used as the basis for chatbots so a researcher or engagement Sponsor can conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with different personas reflecting different stakeholder engagement groups. Quantitative surveys can also be “run” with a pool of AI-generated profiles to generate synthesized data. Synthetic facilitators are chatbots that can be programmed to ask participants a battery of questions, instead of having a human interviewer or session facilitator.
The use of AI agents as synthetic participants or facilitators is seen as cutting down the cost and time needed to recruit humans and work with them to solicit the feedback needed for projects. It is also seen as a way to avoid challenges around choosing the appropriate or most relevant stakeholder groups to work with, as the lower financial cost and time commitment required with synthetic participants allows researchers to experiment with many different personas.