​​​​​Sean Westwood is a Dartmouth professor who's visiting as a Gund Macmillan Scholar. He recently published a PNAS paper on autonomous AI survey bots. In this paper, he shows that these bots can evade current detection methods and produce high-quality survey responses. This capability fundamentally compromises the integrity of research and public opinion polls. Join us for a conversation with Sean about this work and its implications for research and public opinion polls.

About Sean: Sean is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab (PRL). His primary area of research is political behavior and public opinion. His work focuses on understanding where partisan biases originate, where they manifest (inside and outside political domains), and their bounds. He is particularly interested at examining how partisanship and information from political elites affect the behavior of citizens. He has expertise in both survey methods and computational social science. His work has been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behavior, and the American Journal of Political Science.