Sean Westwood, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, will present new work in a KTC Works in Progress lunch talk on April 29, 2026, at 12:30pm in 300 Wallace Hall.

Surveys are a primary source of data across the sciences, from medicine to economics. Westwood will discuss new research demonstrated that the assumption that logically coherent responses are from humans is now untenable. He will show that autonomous AI agents, operating from a simple prompt, can evade current detection methods and produce high-quality survey responses that demonstrate reasoning and coherence expected of human responses. He will discuss how this capability fundamentally compromises the integrity of a critical tool for scientific inquiry, creating an urgent need for the scientific community to develop new standards for data validation and to reevaluate our reliance on unsupervised online data collection.

All members of the Princeton community—undergraduates, graduate students, fellows, staff, and faculty—are invited. Lunch will be served at 12:30 with a 50 minute presentation beginning at 12:40 with time embedded for discussion. Please RSVP for lunch by April 20.

Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.