How many people do you need to conduct a poll? Answer: one. No, that’s not because this is a joke and a punchline is coming. It’s only one because you can simply ask Rally. What is Rally? According to their website it’s “an AI-powered audience research platform that helps you understand how different personas would respond to your product, content, or messaging.” The company has built a wide range of different AI characters which can be asked to respond to poll questions. Their responses will vary in the way real folk do and so you get a gathered reaction to your question which echoes what you would have found statistically in a real-world poll. Rally doesn’t claim to replace existing methods of deep polling with actual human beings, but it does offer rapid prototyping of ideas in preparation for more time-demanding and costly approaches.
Link: AskRally
This makes sense, of course, since LLM’s are, massive polls of human-generated information and opinion. By statistically analysing the links between language tokens in billions of documents, LLM’s build a vast database of human ideas. Because of their probabilistic nature, LLM’s are not fully reliable databases: they operate in a looser world, with randomness built in. Hence, you don’t get the same answer each time and, also, they are prone to hallucinate. Nonetheless, for polling purposes – which only provide approximations of fluctuating human thoughts and feelings – they are very suitable. Maybe, in time, systems like Rally will become so good that they’ll replace even the deeper, in-person polling: no more YouGov or Ipsos (or the ballot box?).
What does the Bible have to say about polling human opinion? Well, we get some examples, though the method varies. So, when the apostles find themselves overwhelmed with work, they realise they need assistants for some tasks. However, they don’t just put out job adverts for anyone to apply, nor do they appoint those whom they think best. Rather, they get the growing church in Jerusalem to choose seven men and then give apostolic recognition to the decision at the end (Acts 6:1-6). However, this polling of opinion is different from one a few chapters earlier. When Judas Iscariot was replaced, the apostles deployed a mixed method of decision-making which combined the church finding suitable candidates (Acts 1:21-23) with giving the final say to the Lord by casting lots over them (Acts 1:24-26; Proverbs 16:33).
Why the change? Why no lot-casting for the seven? Various explanations could be offered. The most obvious is that an apostle officially represents Jesus in the foundation-building stage of his church (Ephesians 2:20) and so his stamp is required upon them. The use of lots showed that the church recognised that Jesus had chosen the new apostle and they simply needed a process to whittle down the candidates to identify his choice. This wasn’t going to come verbally using a prophetic word (you can think about why), so they resorted to a polling-and-lot system. However, the later seven weren’t appointed apostles; they were chosen as men to represent the different groups in the church (Acts 6:1). This was more an earthly decision than a heavenly one.
However, that doesn’t mean that AskRally could be used for such choices today. Why not? Because the church is the body of Christ and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). So though our decisions may be earthly in many respects, there’s always something of the heavenly about them (Matthew 18:19-20). And that’s absent from even the best of LLM’s.
Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash
All posts tagged under technology notebook
Introduction to this series of posts
Cover photo by Denley Photography on Unsplash
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.