Pollsters looking for answers

A week before Greece's May 21 general election, communications consultant Stavros Kontaxis carried out an experiment. Using ChatGPT he designed a model for a poll of polls, inputting all the available survey results to see what kind of conclusion it would yield. Having already been responsible, with his company, for the online pre-election campaign of Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, he tested the model's ability to predict the outcome using the data from that ballot and found it to be successful. When he then processed the data from the Greek public opinion polls he was surprised to see that the chatbot's predictions for the ballot showed a much larger difference (of 15 points) between incumbent New Democracy and main opposition SYRIZA than was being reported. "We all had the same numbers; we just chose to analyze them differently," he notes.

The prediction was...