Freely available tool performs strongly in trials against human interviewers and traditional online surveys. Two London School of Economics scholars have developed a chatbot powered by a large language model that, they say, can complete interviews with thousands of participants in a matter of hours. Rather than having a standard set of multiple-choice and open text questions, as has typically been the case with online surveys, the chatbot takes a conversational approach, collecting interviewees’ responses and using them to generate new questions within a broad set of parameters. Its creators, Friedrich Geiecke, an assistant professor of computational social science, and Xavier Jaravel, a professor of economics, say the tool employs best practice from academic literature – for example, encouraging participants to freely express their views, and then posing follow-up questions to ensure clarity.
