It works both ways - to generate bullshit, and to estimate the social impact. In a recent paper researchers prompted GPT-3 with detailed persona descriptions. Then they asked a bunch of questions, like in a phone poll. They discovered that GPT-3 has detailed knowledge of the biases and likely responses of various populations and can estimate the real poll.

> Researchers with Brigham Young University have written a paper which I think is among the most significant things I’ve ever covered in this newsletter. Specifically, they do three social science experiments on GPT-3 and discover that GPT-3 has biases that are “fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups.”

source: GPT-3 can simulate people very, very well – social science might change

Soon, every influencer, politician, activist or busy body will optimise their messages before posting to attain maximum damage. All they need is to profile the target population and select the right personas for GPT-3.