Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as annotators at scale, they are typically treated as a pragmatic fallback rather than a faithful estimator of human perspectives. This work challenges that presumption. By framing perspective-taking as the estimation of a latent group-level judgment, we characterize the conditions under which modern LLMs can outperform human annotators, including in-group humans, when predicting aggregate subgroup opinions on subjective tasks, and show that these conditions are common in practice. This advantage arises from structural properties of LLMs as estimators, including low variance and reduced coupling between representation and processing biases, rather than any claim of lived experience. Our analysis identifies clear regimes where LLMs act as statistically superior frontline estimators, as well as principled limits where human judgment remains essential. These findings reposition LLMs from a cost-saving compromise to a principled tool for estimating collective human perspectives.

Crowdsourcing has been increasingly utilized to gather subjective assessment, such as evaluating the toxicity of texts. Since there doesnot exist a single “ground truth” answer for subjective annotations, obtaining annotations to accurately reflect the opinions of differentsubgroups becomes a key objective for these subjective assessment tasks. Traditionally, this objective is accomplished by directly soliciting a large number of annotations from each subgroup, which can be costly especially when annotators of certain subgroups are hard to access. In this paper, using toxicity evaluation as an example, we explore the feasibility of using perspective taking—that is, asking annotators to take the point of views of a certain subgroup and estimate opinions within that subgroup—as a way to achieve this objective cost-efficiently. Our results show that compared to the baseline approach of directly soliciting annotations from the target subgroup, perspective taking could lead to better estimates of the subgroup-level opinion when annotations from the target subgroup is costly while the budget is limited. Moreover, prompting annotators to take the perspectives of contrasting subgroups simultaneously can further improve the quality of the estimates. Finally, we find that aggregating multiple perspective-taking annotations while soliciting a small number of annotations directly from the target subgroup for calibration leads to the highest-quality estimates under limited budget.