COMM 372A: The Use of Synthetic Personas in Communication Research

Course Description

LLMs allow the creation of synthetic personas (aka simulated humans, virtual personas, AI personas, artificial personas, persona proxies, digital twins, virtual twins, virtual humans) that may be able to simulate human responses to media. Those simulations, if proven accurate, could change how communication research with and about media is conducted. Theory development and practical applications could be accomplished more quickly, more affordably, with more targeted samples, and perhaps with greater measurement breadth. The goal of this seminar is to experiment with this new research option, one that is gaining significant traction in academic and industry research, and then evaluate and critique its utility in communication research. Via reading and experimentation, we will seek to develop a point of view about how and whether to embrace synthetic personas as a substitute and/or complement to current techniques for studying how media are processed and how media shape our lives.