Round-up: How British are White Americans?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research. Sean Westwood examines the viability of online survey research (a very important source of findings) in the era of LLMs. He shows that LLMs can be programmed to answer online surveys in ways that are indistinguishable from humans, with “synthetic respondents” passing standard bot checks 99% of the time. Such respondents could be used by foreign actors to manipulate public opinion.

The metabolic costs of cognition. Sharna Jamadar and colleagues review the literature on the metabolic costs of cognition in humans. They note that while the brain uses the most energy of any organ in the body, it is remarkably energy efficient. Thanks to various optimisation mechanisms, goal-directed cognition uses only 5% more energy than resting neural activity. Cognitive decline in old age is associated with disruption of neural energy homeostasis.