Do Synthetic Personas Predict Real Audience Response? A Sim-to-Real Study Where a No-Persona Baseline Beats Persona-Based Copy Simulation

arXiv cs.AISeptember 23, 2026en

arXiv:2609.25010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marketers increasingly use large language models (LLMs) as "synthetic personas" to predict how an audience will react to a piece of copy before it ships, encouraged by evidence that profile-conditioned LLMs mimic human samples. But is that prediction actually valid against real behaviour - and does the persona machinery help? We present a sim-to-real validity study using the Upworthy Research Archive - thousands of headline A/B tests on shared real traffic, with measured click-through - as held-out ground truth. We compare a ten-persona panel, grounded in the real audience's demographics, against a no-persona zero-shot baseline that simply asks

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