Generative AI is increasingly presented as a potential substitute for humans, including as human research subjects in various disciplines. Yet there is no scientific consensus on how closely these in-silico clones could represent their human counterparts. While some defend the use of these “synthetic users,” others point towards the biases in the responses provided by the LLMs. Through an experiment using survey questionnaires, we demonstrate that these latter critics are right to be wary of using generative AI to emulate respondents, but probably not for the right reason. Our results […]