Simulated Consensus
From the Cambridge Analytica revelations of 2016 to the opinion-shaping experiments with large-language models (LLMs) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the act of voting has been recast—at dizzying speed—from an expression of will into a service to be optimised. Simulated Consensus situates itself at this historical inflection point, exposing the deterministic hazards that emerge when democracy is progressively “modelled” by generative AI.
A 2024 study by ETH Zurich’s Computational Social Science group demonstrated that with only minimal demographic cues, personas generated inside an LLM reproduced more than 70 percent of the ranking order found in human voting results. Research at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub showed that allowing an LLM additional reasoning steps pushes this concordance beyond 80 percent. A future in which collective decisions can be forecast with the precision of a weather report is no longer speculative.
The installation stages the deserted open-plan office of a fictitious tech firm. Autonomous AI agents run relentless real-time simulations, their silent labour projected to the viewer. Behind the scenes, the system synthesises approximately 100,000 virtual voters from eleven attributes—gender, age, income, marital status, dependents, occupation, education, political orientation, environmental attitude, religion/belief, and lifestyle—and feeds them into large-scale electoral models. Well before any real ballot is cast, a user can adjust issues and options, democratically shepherding citizens, employees, or acquaintances toward outcomes that favour their own interests.
As LLMs voraciously absorb activity histories + live behaviour + social ties, individual voters are distilled into mere “probability mass.” Voting behaviour is no longer a random scatter but is visualised like isobars in a weather model, while free will becomes indistinguishable from the waste heat of a server room.
In an era of accelerating technology, legislative reform, civic literacy, and artistic intervention must act in concert. Simulated Consensus opens with a provocation—install the technology that hacks your own constraints—and invites a wholesale redesign of action aimed at reclaiming unpredictability as the bedrock of genuine choice.
