Summary: Data from AI-generated respondents pointed to the same conclusion as a survey of 604 humans but contained far fewer distinct answers.

More teams are turning to synthetic users (AI-generated stand-ins for research participants) to run studies without recruiting real people. We’ve previously explored how synthetic users perform in interviews . This time, we wanted to test them on a more scoped task: answering a single open-ended question from a survey .

To do this, we reused a question from our earlier survey on UX terminology , in which 604 tech and design professionals told us what name they’d use for UX work. We posed the same question to 120 synthetic respondents and then compared the two datasets.…