An experiment simulating more than 1000 real people using the artificial intelligence model behind ChatGPT has successfully replicated their unique thoughts and personalities with high accuracy, sparking concerns about the ethics of mimicking individuals in this way.

Joon Sung Park at Stanford University in California and his colleagues wanted to use generative AI tools to model individuals as a way of forecasting the impact of policy changes. Historically, this has been attempted using more simplistic rule-based statistical models, with limited success.