Faisal Awartani

There is a strange thing that happens to data during a crisis. At first, the indicators deteriorate. Then, eventually, our ability to measure those indicators deteriorates too. That creates a paradox: the more rapidly reality changes, the more urgently we need accurate information, and the harder that information becomes to collect directly. That is when observation begins to give way to inference. Take Lebanon. Years of economic crisis, institutional weakness, infrastructure deterioration,...

By: Faisal Awartani (Ph.D.) , email: faisal@insights.ps Anthropic's decision to watermark AI-generated content is an important step toward transparency. But I wonder whether simply labeling something “AI-generated” tells us enough about its intellectual origin. Perhaps we should think about generative AI through a biological analogy: Prompt = Genotype (DNA)AI model + context = Developmental environmentGenerated output = Phenotype A sophisticated prompt is not merely an instruction. It can...

Can AI Replace the People in Public-Opinion Research? Field research is expensive, slow and often frustrating. Researchers recruit and train enumerators, arrange access, travel to communities, chase respondents and clean incomplete data—sometimes only to confirm something that was already broadly predictable. So why not let AI estimate what people are likely to say? This is not necessarily bad research. With enough historical data, AI can identify stable relationships between people’s...