Are AI-generated Survey Responses- A New Market Research Threat?

AI is changing how surveys are done. Businesses are using AI to automate tasks like collecting and analyzing survey data. While this can make things easier, it also raises the risk of survey fraud.

Survey fraud has been a big issue for a long time. Even with many tools to fight it, fraud is getting worse. The number of fraudulent responses has increased by 780 times.

The number is daunting.

However, AI brings new challenges that traditional methods can’t always handle. We need AI-powered solutions to detect and prevent survey fraud.

An “AI” for an “AI”. solving AI-generated survey frauds with AI solutions.

Survey Fraud- Understanding Types

Imagine you spent months and a lot of money on a survey for a new product, only to find out the results are not what you expected.

What if fake responses are skewing your data? What if you did not receive responses that align with your goal? What if people are greedy to earn more rewards by generating fake AI responses?

All your efforts are wasted!

Researchers must learn about different types of survey fraud and understand how it can impact the results.

• Fraudulent Panelists: Some people give fake answers to get rewards. They might use fake names or bots to fill out surveys quickly.
• Survey Farms: Groups of people who fill out surveys with bad answers just to earn rewards. Their answers don’t help and lower data quality.
• Professional Survey Takers: People who take many surveys just to get rewards. They might not answer carefully or truthfully.
• Duplicate Responses: The same survey is being filled out multiple times. This can happen to get more rewards or because of technical issues.
• Fabricated Responses: Fake or silly answers to qualify for rewards. These distort the survey results.
• Click Farms and Bots: Automated scripts or workers filling out surveys fast to cheat or earn rewards.

With time, these fraud types are evolving, making it harder to maintain data integrity. Then comes the AI survey fraud, posing a new challenge.

AI-Driven Survey Fraud: A New Challenge

AI-driven fraud represents a significant challenge because traditional fraud detection methods are increasingly ineffective, resulting in.

• Sophisticated Response Generation: AI tools can produce answers that are contextually appropriate and convincing, mimicking human responses so well that are hard to distinguish from real answers.
• Deepfakes in Surveys: AI is not limited to text; it extends to video and voice. Deepfake technology can create realistic but false video or audio responses, complicating the process of verifying participant authenticity.
• Overly Perfect Answers: AI can generate responses that are too polished or perfectly aligned with expected patterns, which can mislead researchers into thinking the data is authentic.
• Contextual Manipulation: AI can create answers with detailed context and nuanced language, making it difficult to spot inconsistencies without a deeper analysis.

Traditional methods may miss these sophisticated AI-generated frauds, leading to unreliable data.

Impact of AI-Generated Survey Fraud

AI-generated survey fraud can affect data quality in several ways.

• Reduced Data Accuracy: Fake responses created by AI can make the data unreliable. This means decisions based on this data might be wrong.
• Misguided Strategies: If the data is skewed, businesses might come up with poor strategies and waste resources.
• Increased Costs: Finding and dealing with AI fraud can make business operations more expensive.
• Damaged Reputation: Frequent data problems can hurt a company’s reputation with clients and stakeholders.
• Complex Data Analysis: Analyzing data gets tougher with fake responses, needing more advanced tools and methods.
• Resource Drain: Ensuring data quality takes more time and effort, pulling resources away from other important tasks.
• Inconsistent Results: Fraudulent data can lead to mixed results, making it hard to trust the findings.

The impact is huge. Not only this, AI challenges like video and voice deepfakes are significantly impacting the quality of live surveys. Today, 37% of organizations have encountered voice fraud, and 29% are affected by deepfake voices.

So, how do you overcome it and strategize to avoid survey fraud?

So, how can one deal with it?

There isn’t a perfect way to stop AI-generated fraud. However, Our market research experts have highlighted a few steps to reduce the impact.

1. Ask Unique Questions: Use questions that are hard for AI to answer accurately. For example, instead of asking broad questions, ask for specific details.
2. Follow-Up Interviews: Include brief follow-up interviews or ask for video responses to verify authenticity.
3. Use AI Detection Tools: Employ advanced AI detection tools that use machine learning to identify patterns of AI-generated content.
4. Combine Detection Methods: Use various fraud detection techniques like cross-referencing responses and behavioral analysis.

Top Survey Fraud Detection Strategies

Below are some proven methods to discover frauds entering the survey.

1. Use Reliable Sources

Integrate third-party APIs from trusted suppliers around the world to drive genuine respondents. This helps verify the authenticity of panelists and their responses.

2. Implement Fraud Detection Techniques

• Digital Fingerprinting: it is the most commonly used technique with a 95% success rate in eliminating duplicate responses. It tracks respondents on desktop and mobile devices based on different settings.
• GEO IP- it filters respondents based on GEO IP and finds digital identities beyond IP addresses. It lets you track the geolocation of data sources of dynamic respondents to understand if you are getting genuine responses.
• Open-end answer validation- Use advanced filters to check survey responses. These filters can quickly spot and remove bad language, copied responses, and offensive terms. They help ensure accurate results and can handle multiple languages.
• Respondents address verification- Check respondents’ addresses to make sure they’re correct. We use USPS to verify addresses before people can start the survey. This helps keep the survey data accurate by removing fake addresses.
• Mobile verification- you can verify respondent’s identity by sending OTP to their registered mobile phones before they enter the survey.
• Custom controls- Having fraud detection is not enough as respondents are smart enough to break the code. So our experts can place custom control on top of these techniques to keep the fraud away and make way for genuine respondents to complete the survey. Some checks like survey completion time, completion rate, red herring questions, open-end questions, and others make fraud entry complex.
• Attention Checks: Include questions that verify whether participants are engaged and paying attention.
• IP Blocking: Prevent responses from suspicious or duplicate IP addresses to avoid fraudulent entries.

3. Leverage Advanced Panel Management Software

• Monitor Survey Quality: Continuously check the accuracy and reliability of responses using specialized software.
• Create Quality Scores: Develop scores to evaluate the validity of responses, including analyzing answers to open-ended questions.
• Analyze Length of Interaction (LOI): Assess how long respondents spend on surveys to ensure their answers are thoughtful and not rushed.

These steps help businesses maintain the integrity and accuracy of their survey data, improving the quality of insights and decisions based on the research.

Detecting and Reducing Survey Fraud- The OnGraph’s way

As the market research industry evolves, there are important questions to address to ensure more people complete surveys and that the collected data is valuable.

With AI becoming a part of almost every field, the market research industry needs to discuss these issues and set standards for detecting fraud.

By considering all options and their effects, market research firms can better understand how to keep their data accurate and trustworthy.

Consult with market research companies like OnGraph for AI-powered fraud detection techniques integration and development services.

Fight against survey frauds with OnGraph’s expertise.