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. Both datasets led to the same overall conclusion, but the synthetic responses varied much less than the human ones.
How the Synthetic Respondents Were GeneratedWe obtained the synthetic responses in February 2026 using Synthetic Users , a generative-AI-based platform that simulates research participants and their responses.
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