Surprises from the Shadows: Confronting Intrusions from Bots & Generative AI in Survey Research
Vincent Cho et al.
Unbeknownst to many researchers, online surveys can be vulnerable to attacks from bots and generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can generate hundreds of fraudulent responses instantly. Confronting this challenge to data integrity, we employed an adaptive approach to test the effectiveness of various anti-fraud tactics (e.g., CAPTCHA; honeypot questions; question pairs; open-ended questions) and to distinguish between good-faith human respondents versus bots or fraudsters. Findings reve