AI can’t simulate human preferences - new study tests LLMs against thousands of real users

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18311 There’s a massive trend right now where companies are trying to replace real human feedback with LLM-driven "synthetic users." The idea sounds great on paper - why would you spend money and time recruiting real people to test products, pick design choices, or evaluate options when you can just prompt? They tested LLMs across 28 real-world studies spanni