Synthetic respondent

A synthetic respondent is a language model prompted with a demographic and attitudinal profile, sometimes grounded in real survey data, that answers questions as that person might. A group of them is a synthetic panel.

They are useful for pre-testing a questionnaire, exploring hypotheses cheaply and filling in hard-to-reach segments. They do not replace talking to people when the decision is expensive. Knowing which case you are in is an insights engineer skill.