Evaluating Large Language Models in Generating Synthetic HCI Research Data: a Case Study

The Illusion of Artificial Inclusion

“…The proposals frequently conditioned these speed and scale arguments on claims about the accuracy of LLMs. Immediately after identifying "high speed" as a potential benefit of substitution, Hämäläinen et al [61] 1: A summary of the surveyed proposals to substitute human participants in research and development with large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). The "Motivation(s) discussed" column lists the potential goals of substitution explicitly discussed by each source.…”

“…The defining feature of these "substitution proposals" is the idea that LLMs can simulate or replicate the cognition, decision making, and attitudes of human participants in order to fulfill a role that participants normally play in a project. 2 For example, to empirically test the possibility of substitution in HCI, Hämäläinen et al [61] collected materials from a previous user study with human participants and reformulated them as appropriate inputs for an LLM. The authors passed these inputs to an LLM, parsed the model's outputs as synthetic user responses, and then analyzed and interpreted those responses as they would from human participants.…”

“…These substitution proposals focus on human participation in AI development [36,54] and in a range of scientific fields including user research [33,61,131], social and cognitive psychology [47], and survey research [10]. While we do not claim that this survey represents an exhaustive review, the diversity of the surveyed sources helps provide a broad perspective on the idea of substituting generative AI for human participation.…”

“…Gilardi et al [54] estimate that the cost of LLM surrogates is on the order of "thirty times cheaper than MTurk", a standard online platform for recruiting human participants. Likewise, Hämäläinen et al [61] laud the possibility of "low cost and high speed of LLM data generation" in the context of user research. Four sources connect this point to a related motivation: reducing the need for manual labor.…”

“…The past year has seen a growing number of proposals recommending the replacement of human participants in technology development and scientific research with large language models (LLMs), a new class of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These proposals include at least thirteen technical reports and peer-reviewed research articles, jointly sharing over one thousand citations at the time of this manuscript's submission [4,10,16,33,36,47,53,54,61,65,68,107,143], in addition to several commercial products [103,131,138].…”