Articles

How AI Exposes Our Double Standards

How AI Exposes Our Double Standards

Rhys Fisher
April 29, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

Polls say most of us believe in “equal justice,” yet the moment a headline names our hero or our villain, our moral math flips. In my latest experiment, I fed Rally personas a stream of fake social-media posts and hard coded them to have a favorite between Kanye and Will Smith. The result? Turns out AI has double standards. So do humans. We witnessed how virtual audience simulations could be used to pressure-test in silicon before PR teams click publish.

Why Stated Values Die at Checkout

Why Stated Values Die at Checkout

Rhys Fisher
April 26, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

When it’s your money on the line, do you really pay double for "Made in USA"? Ramon tested it with real shoppers and walked away empty handed. We tested real-time buyer decisions using role-playing agents, and the results might surprise you.

How to Prompt in Rally: It’s Different Than GPT

How to Prompt in Rally: It’s Different Than GPT

Rhys Fisher
April 23, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

Prompt engineering got its hype moment when Anthropic flashed a $225 K salary for anyone who could bend words into gold. Rally raises the stakes. It lets you address a stadium of GPT personas at once—but that power demands a new playbook: virtual-audience simulation prompting. Treat the crowd like a poll (“How many of you prefer …?”) and you get lukewarm averages. Challenge them like a panel (“Pick A, B, or C—defend your choice”) and every agent steps up with sharp, contrasting takes that expose blind spots, trade-offs, and hidden opportunities. The gap between those two sentences is the difference between genuine market signal and background static. This article shows you how to close it.

I Predicted The Sentiment of +26,044 Post Replies—Before They Happened—With 82.7% Accuracy

I Predicted The Sentiment of +26,044 Post Replies—Before They Happened—With 82.7% Accuracy

Rhys Fisher
April 22, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

What if you could see tomorrow’s social-media outrage unfold today—predicting thousands of angry comments before anyone even hits “reply”? I simulated future threads using AI personas, anticipated sentiment with near-perfect accuracy (up to 99.9%), and uncovered exactly how tiny shifts in prompts and audience design can make or break predictions. Here’s the play-by-play of that experiment, and why accuracy alone is meaningless without the context that shapes it.

Virtual Audience Simulation Canvas: Designing For LLM-Powered Synthetic Data Insights

Virtual Audience Simulation Canvas: Designing For LLM-Powered Synthetic Data Insights

Simara
April 17, 2025 • By Simara

Discover how researchers are using LLMs to create synthetic data simulating virtual audiences of role-playing agents that mimic real demographic behaviors and opinions. This article introduces the Virtual Audience Simulation Canvas—a practical framework for designing AI personas that avoid common pitfalls like demographic blind spots and sanitized responses. Discover how this approach is being applied across UX testing, marketing, and policy research to generate insights in days instead of months, while learning key techniques to improve simulation realism through belief anchoring and anti-memetic constraints that keep personas true to life.

LLM-Based Role-Playing Simulations: Demographic Gaps and Mitigation Strategies

LLM-Based Role-Playing Simulations: Demographic Gaps and Mitigation Strategies

Simara
April 16, 2025 • By Simara

As researchers increasingly employ large language models (LLMs) to role-play virtual survey respondents, significant demographic gaps have emerged in their accuracy and realism. Certain populations—such as older adults, racial minorities, women (particularly women of color), lower socioeconomic groups, and ideological centrists—are consistently underrepresented or misrepresented by these models. This post examines the underlying reasons for these demographic discrepancies, including biased training data, alignment-induced censorship, and oversimplified demographic interactions. It also presents practical strategies for mitigating these biases, outlining how thoughtful prompt engineering, targeted fine-tuning, and nuanced alignment adjustments can help create more authentic and inclusive LLM-based role-play simulations.

Reproducing Real-World Demographic Biases in AI Agent Simulations

Reproducing Real-World Demographic Biases in AI Agent Simulations

Simara
April 16, 2025 • By Simara

As researchers increasingly utilize large language models (LLMs) to simulate human behaviors and attitudes based on real-world demographic characteristics, important questions arise about how accurately these AI-generated agents replicate true demographic biases and preferences. While recent studies demonstrate promising alignment between simulated outputs and actual demographic trends—referred to as “algorithmic fidelity”—they also expose notable methodological challenges and limitations, including potential oversimplifications, exaggerated stereotypes, and inconsistent representations of marginalized groups. Understanding these nuances is essential for responsibly leveraging AI simulations as reliable proxies for real human populations in social science research.

Fast or Smart: How Do You Choose?

Fast or Smart: How Do You Choose?

Rhys Fisher
April 15, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

With synthetic research and persona-driven prompting still in beta, little is known about how different AI models shape responses. In our simulated buying committee experiment, we found that more powerful models can replicate the complex decision-making seen in high-stakes human scenarios. If you want your synthetic research to truly mirror human thought, here's how choosing between Fast and Smart mode can unlock insights that reflect real-world nuance.

Changing Artificial Minds By Feeding Them Biased Media

Changing Artificial Minds By Feeding Them Biased Media

Mike Taylor
April 09, 2025 • By Mike Taylor

Discover how AI agents trained on different media diets can predict voter behavior in virtual elections, as demonstrated in this fascinating experiment simulating the 2024 Trump-Harris race. See how targeted media exposure flipped AI personas from Democrat to Republican, revealing both the power of information bubbles and LLMs' inherent biases—with powerful implications for understanding audience psychology in marketing campaigns beyond politics.

Predicting Gamer Preference With 85% Accuracy

Predicting Gamer Preference With 85% Accuracy

Mike Taylor
April 09, 2025 • By Mike Taylor

Discover how AI personas predict gamer preferences with 85% accuracy, potentially saving millions in development costs. This game concept experiment tested virtual audiences against real human data, revealing surprising insights for game designers and marketers working with limited research and development budgets.

How To Access The Free Plan

How To Access The Free Plan

Mike Taylor
April 02, 2025 • By Mike Taylor

Unlock your free access to Rally with just a few simple steps! From exploring pre-generated audiences to creating your own, Rally makes it easy to interact with your audience and uncover valuable insights. Want to try before you buy? Here's how to access the free plan.

Generative Agent Simulation Guide

Generative Agent Simulation Guide

Simara
February 13, 2025 • By Simara

Discover how LLM-powered agent-based simulations can revolutionize business strategy. Learn how AI-driven models predict market trends, optimize customer experiences, and enhance decision-making with realistic simulations.