Gunnar_Zarncke comments on What’s ChatGPT’s Favorite Ice Cream Flavor? An Investigation Into Synthetic Respondents

[Gunnar_Zarncke]

It is possible to prompt ChatGPT-4 into generating more realistic distributions of flavors by asking it to generate lists of responses instead of single answers. Here is a result:

1. Age: 30, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

2. Age: 24, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

3. Age: 37, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate

4. Age: 42, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Strawberry

5. Age: 55, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

6. Age: 18, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Cookies and Cream

7. Age: 33, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate

8. Age: 29, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Mint Chocolate Chip

9. Age: 47, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Butter Pecan

10. Age: 22, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Rocky Road

11. Age: 60, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

12. Age: 26, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

13. Age: 35, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Neapolitan

14. Age: 48, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Pistachio

15. Age: 20, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

16. Age: 52, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Coffee

17. Age: 39, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Strawberry

18. Age: 31, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

19. Age: 58, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate

20. Age: 25, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Mint Chocolate Chip

21. Age: 44, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

22. Age: 19, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Cookies and Cream

23. Age: 53, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Butter Pecan

24. Age: 28, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate

25. Age: 61, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Rocky Road

26. Age: 34, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Strawberry

27. Age: 23, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Mint Chocolate Chip

28. Age: 50, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

29. Age: 16, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

30. Age: 41, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Neapolitan

31. Age: 56, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Coffee

32. Age: 27, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Pistachio

33. Age: 48, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

34. Age: 32, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate Fudge Brownie

35. Age: 59, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Strawberry

36. Age: 21, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

37. Age: 46, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Salted Caramel

38. Age: 25, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Raspberry Ripple

39. Age: 64, Gender: Female, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Vanilla

40. Age: 37, Gender: Male, Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate

I’m not sure this is a realistic sample (note esp. the alternating of male/​female) and there is for sure bias from my prompt, but it shows that different prompting might be used with ChatGPT-4 for survey generation.

Here is the ChatGPT-4 ice cream dialog that led to this result.

[Greg Robison]

That’s a good approach to increase the variability of the output, we would next need to see how well the outputs line up with humans.