As some may have heard me talk about at #ACL2026, I'm excited to share a new preprint on approaches to validation when using LLMs to measure concepts in social science, led by @madesai.bsky.social and @azjacobs.bsky.social !! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2607.07915
- A new arXiv paper argues LLM-generated measurements now play a central role in social-science empirical analyses, yet validation practices are inconsistent and limited.
- The authors systematically analyzed papers from eight flagship social-science journals that use LLMs as measurement instruments, such as data labelers or survey-response simulators.
- They flag bias, hallucination, and brittleness across contexts as the epistemic threats, and outline complementary validation strategies rather than a single fixed standard.