Abstract: Take a glance through recent news or social media and you would be hard-pressed not to see mentions of chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) methods aimed at generating text, images and other content. Recent work by Eloundou and colleagues (2023) explored the potential impact of these types of generative AI on labor markets, and survey research, specifically was among the top two most impacted industries. In light of this finding, naturally, we wonder: how will this tech change the work in our field? How might chatbot technologies or related software be leveraged to support, enhance, or expand our work by assisting with a common research approach within the social sciences: surveys. And even still, how might survey and social science, more broadly, contribute to the improvement of large language models (LLMs)? In this workshop we will describe how LLMs work and showcase some of the current ways that these models are being used within the survey research process chronicling their applications in the design, collection, and analyses of survey data based on a large-scale systematic review of the social science, AI and computer science literature. We will also discuss some limitations of this technology as it relates to applications within the survey research process. We will also pose some relevant ideas around how survey research can also contribute to the development and refinement of large language models. And we note that no part of this abstract was generated using a chatbot.

This course will count for 4.0 CSS short course credits.