‘Our assumptions are broken’: how fraudulent church data revealed AI’s threat to polling

Experts say paid participants are using automated tools to generate unreliable survey responses at scale

If you had been keeping tabs on the news about church attendance in Britain lately, you would be forgiven for thinking the country was in the midst of a Christian revival.

Stories of swelling congregations, filled with young people returning to the flock, spurred on by everything from social media to a rise in bible sales appeared to be confirmed by a 2024 report from the Bible Society.