"I recently heard some comments from executives working in marketing agencies, where they praised the merits of focus groups whose participants were all generated by artificial intelligence. They spoke about synthetic personas and synthetic groups, presenting it as the future of advertising pre-testing. Have you come across any research on these practices? Or any critical work on such claims?"
I have read about creating synthetic personas with AI, but I think using them in a focus group would be a bad joke. Those personas are usually generated from a short paragraph of descriptive characteristics, which basically produces a stereotypical "participant." Maybe a conversation among those stereotypes would be adequate for discussing a product in marketing research, but there is no way that it would capture the level of meaning that we typically seek in academic research using focus groups.
Research in this area is still growing and is actually an emerging trend in marketing and advertising. These AI-generated participants can mimic diverse demographics and behaviors, allowing companies to conduct focus groups without the logistical challenges and biases associated with real human participants.
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