Detecting AI-Generated Responses in Outsourced Survey Data Collection
Speaker
Research surveys that are outsourced to a third party are vulnerable to tampering with AI. Such outsourcing can leave researchers compromised – with third party vendors batch generating survey responses.
So far, academic research into AI contamination has focused primarily on how individual respondents may use AI-generated responses in surveys. In this discussion, Konstantin Bogatyrev (Department of Government) presents research that analysed an online survey of Russian residents in 2026 to highlight the risk that data providers in an outsourced data collection pipeline may also use AI to fabricate responses. He will explore the conditions leading to such risks and suggest practical safeguards for researchers who outsource fieldwork.
Meet our speaker
Dr Konstantin Bogatyrev is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Government and a DSI Faculty Affiliate. His research examines the politics of illiberalism, using quantitative methods ranging from survey experiments to causal inference with observational data. His methodological work includes synthetic control estimation and, more recently, the detection of AI-generated responses in survey research. He received his PhD in Public Policy from Bocconi University in 2025, and has published in the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Scientific Data.
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