From Fraud to Foresight: a Double-Edged Sword of Synthetic Data in Market Research

At this year’s AChemS meeting, I gave a talk on AI in sensory research. One of the demonstrations I gave was intentionally provocative: I asked ChatGPT to simulate a consumer research study using MaxDiff and Implicit Association Testing (IAT) to explore the perception of "freshness" in home fragrance products.

Let me be clear: the goal was not to fake data but to stress-test a study design. By simulating how people might respond, I wanted to explore gaps, assumptions, and how well our methods differentiated between products. Consider it a pilot study by proxy.