Finally, we also had a paper with collaborator @tskuo.bsky.social at CMU on enabling collective design of community bots via a system that surfaces provocative hypothetical cases as a way to stress-test and iterate on bot policy: arxiv.org/abs/2509.25492
Kevin @kjfeng.me also had a Best Paper award for his project on Cocoa, a system for human-agent collaboration on complex tasks via stepwise interactions that delegate agency and enable interleaving of planning & execution: arxiv.org/abs/2412.10999
Next, @kjfeng.me built a system for LLM policy prototyping - where domain experts can collaboratively work in small groups to author, evaluate, and iterate on LLM policy - out of needs we found running workshops in OpenAI's Democratic Inputs to AI program. arxiv.org/abs/2509.19680
First, @leijiew.bsky.social led a paper on a HiTL prompt optimization technique that supports steerability and interpretability without sacrificing performance over APO. He built this into a working tool for YTers to author content classifiers for their comments. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Feeling FOMO that I can't be at #CHI2026 this year but please check out all the great work that our @socialfutureslab.bsky.social + friends are presenting (see below for paper links). And say hi to @kjfeng.me @aliciaguo.com, Katie Yurechko, and Tony Zhou who are at the conference!
🚨We are excited to announce the 2nd Pluralistic Alignment Workshop at #ICML2026 in Seoul!
Submissions: openreview.net/group?id=ICM...
🗓️Deadline: May 3
More details pluralistic-alignment.github.io
We invite work on pluralistic alignment across technical, philosophical, and societal perspectives!
A slide showing that the posterior is proportional to the likelihood times the prior
I wrote a blog post on my experience using AI for slide generation
Basic idea: write your lecture notes first, then prompt the LLM to produce corresponding slides in reveal.js (h/t @chenhaotan.bsky.social). I'm picky about my slides but was happy with the results!
alexanderhoyle.com/posts/ai-sli...
Because of Canada’s inability to grant him a visitor visa in time 😒 Leijie will be presenting remotely instead of attending in person as he had planned. But please feel free to reach out with questions. We plan to put all our findings online in a couple more weeks.
Wish I could make it to #ATmosphereconf but instead, please come to a presentation by my student @leijiew.bsky.social, who will be talking about our interview study understanding experiences and needs of feed creators: atmosphereconf.org/event/VLerG2y
As part of our series “Democratizing AI for the Global Majority,” Teanna Barrett (@bound4nostar.bsky.social) examines the politics and power asymmetries shaping AI development in Africa today, and how developing local AI ecosystems might offer a path for progress. datasociety.net/points/towar...
Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Do We Need Subsidiarity in Software? #CHI2026 paper led by @louisaconwill.bsky.social. Subsidiarity is a principle where decisions or control occurs at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary. Think about that for platforms like this one...
Read it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.13466
We opened up applications for the Brown AI Policy Summer School! Please share with any computing or computational social science students who want to engage substantively with policymaking in the United States: cntr.brown.edu/summer-school.
Deadline March 27th!!! Funding available!
Botender helps communities iteratively align their AI agents with their collective intents through case-based provocations.
🔮 How can we empower online communities to design AI agents tailored to their unique needs and norms?
In our #CHI2026 paper, we introduce #Botender, a system that enables collaborative design of AI agents through 🔥case-based provocation🔥
ICYMI: Finally blogged about an old paper (led by @groceryheist.cc) that explains why people often engage in multiple groups with overlapping topic and membership, and which helps explain why competition between online groups seems to be rare. mako.cc/copyrighteou...
Can’t say I really consider myself an expert in this area given the many exemplary leaders I see around me, but it was a great time chatting on this podcast! Thanks for having me!
Haha, aw that is very high praise coming from you! Dream team right here!!
The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X.
Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)
Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...
Post quoting another post with an image. Things I notice: - The quoted post is truncated with an ellipsis so it doesn’t take up the whole screen. - There’s a “1/8” widget after the text of the quoted post, indicating that it’s a thread. - The user’s handle and avatar are the only identification on the post; there’s no display name clutter. - Relative date formats aren’t used.
Quote of a post that embeds a video and an image in a scrollable carousel. - The video smoothly autoplays inside the carousel. - Scrolling the carousel works perfectly. - Tapping the image or the video animates it to fill the screen with no jank. - You can swipe between the video and the rest of the carousel when it’s full screen and it just works the way you’d want.
Ephemeral “ghost post” that displays differently and gets archived after 24 hours (like Instagram stories)
Suggested post and reply in feed - There’s a nice little “OP liked” social proof thing on the reply. - Also you can’t tell because I’m posting this on srgbsky but the heart icon is a brilliant out-of-gamut red.
Not gonna lie, it’s pretty annoying that every time I download Threads I see a half dozen new interesting meticulously-executed features that are distinct from what any similar app is doing
🚨 New CHI 2026 Workshop 🚨
PoliSim@CHI 2026: LLM Agent Simulation for Policy
Remember when the internet wasn't awful? We can go back to that.
Some friends and I have released the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call to bring back such a time, to see if we can bring back a world where technology works for us, rather than against us.
resonantcomputing.org
I'll be at #neurips2025 briefly for the workshop weekend, specifically the Algorithmic Collective Action workshop and Regulatable ML workshop (where @kjfeng.me was selected to give an oral for his workshop paper on regulating agent UIs!). LMK if you're around!
As many know, @bjard.bsky.social and I have been drafting a Technology Law coursebook for a few years. We've used it to teach classes at three institutions, including Yale Law School, and others have used chapters in their techlaw classes.
We're excited to share the current version more broadly!
The UW Center for an Informed Public is looking for postdocs (for 2026-2028) from across diverse disciplines whose research sheds light on the challenges of our modern information environment, promotes civic health, and/or helps people/communities navigate online spaces: apply.interfolio.com/177901
Oh absolutely, we will anonymize all responses in any publication!
it's been a long time coming, but i'm happy to share that my latest creative project is finally here...
@anisota.net is an experimental social client (and game!) for Bluesky and the AT Protocol
i built it for me because i'm kinda weird and needed an equally weird way to experience social media 🕯️
Bright red tree, Japanese maple
White fluffy Samoyed dog in front of tree
Beautiful tree on my walk! (+ cute dog)
Well given there are like 70k? and counting feeds, I’m sure you are not alone! It’s a really interesting use case and has implications for sustainability to have that institutional backing. we will reach out!!
Well this is sure to be a blockbuster AI article... @jennarussell.bsky.social et al are kicking ass and taking names in journalism, both individuals and organizations.
"AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed"
arxiv.org/abs/2510.18774
Yes we will publish what we find! Although I don’t know if we’ll have the answer to that question as we’re mostly talking to feed creators and not users (unless you mean these institutions creating custom feeds? I haven’t heard much about this).