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  • CORRESPONDENCE

Rethinking AI’s role in survey research: from threat to collaboration

By
  1. Melissa Dan Wang

    1. The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

  2. Xiaoli Su

    1. Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China.

An artificial-intelligence bot can now pass 99.8% of attention-check questions in surveys (see Nature 650, 17; 2026). But this needn’t be a threat: these checks were invented to catch careless human respondents. AI did not create the data-quality problem — it has simply made it harder to ignore.

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Nature 651, 846 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00862-9

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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