2026 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute Development Awards - Schmidt Sciences Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) is supporting 11 global interdisciplinary research teams to explore collaborative AI interventions with the potential to catalyze major bre...

Excited to announce, w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social, @ari-holtzman.bsky.social & Emily Wenger, that we won a Schmidt Science AI grant to build AI systems for storytelling + narrative world making. How do you get AI to tell immersive, believable, interesting stories? www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-humanit...

"80% of the time" bafflingly misleading way to frame the use of AI IN AN EXPERIMENTAL TASK where people were explicitly given this as an option, not some kind of observation across all their waking lives.

Great 2-year postdoc for a digital humanities/I school/computational culture scholar to work on computer vision + film/TV w/ great colleagues @ Distant Viewing Lab @nolauren.bsky.social (U of Richmond). These guys are doing cutting edge stuff, apply! richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...

Excited to share this new paper - accepted at CHI - testing the affordances of AI assistance for literary-cultural interpretation or "close reading" w/ @jiayinzhi.bsky.social @mnlee.bsky.social + @hoytlong.bsky.social. Can AI help students/people interpret cultural objects? arxiv.org/html/2603.06...

[AI and Close Reading] Can AI help us interpret culture? AI is already becoming part of how people read cultural texts online. What does AI do for cultural interpretation? We explored this question in a randomized experiment investigating the impact of AI a...

𝑪𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝑰 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒑 𝒖𝒔 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒕 𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆? In our new #CHI2026 paper, we studied how AI assistance affects close reading poems — not just how well people interpret poems, but also the pleasure derived from close reading. closereading-ai.app
#AI #HCI #closereading #humanities #culture #poetry

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Critical Confabulation: Can LLMs Hallucinate for Social Good? LLMs hallucinate, yet some confabulations can have social affordances if carefully bounded. We propose critical confabulation (inspired by critical fabulation from literary and social theory), the use...

The talk is based on a paper I co wrote with @eduede.bsky.social @hoytlong.bsky.social & Patrick Sui that is accepted and forthcoming at ICLR 2026. Here's the preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07722

Frontiers | Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be...

I'm on a 38(!)-author paper just published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, "Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology". We splice Schleiermacher and hermeneutic theory into AI debates, arguing AI are "context machines".
www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

Why Slop Matters | ACM AI Letters AI-generated “slop” is often seen as digital pollution. We argue that this dismissal of the topic risks missing important aspects of AI Slop which deserve rigorous study. AI Slop serves a social funct...

New paper on Why Slop Matters w/ great group of co authors (@hoytlong.bsky.social @eduede.bsky.social @ari-holtzman.bsky.social + others not on Bluesky) from ACM AI Letters. We try to move the debate re: AI Slop past normative, neg claims & towards parsing its social uses. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Huge congrats, Aarthi! Can't wait to read this.

The social AI author: modeling creativity and distinction in simulated cultural fields - AI & SOCIETY This article examines generative AI models as sociocultural actors, focusing on how they reproduce and constrain notions of authorship and identity within the contemporary U.S. literary field. Through...

New paper in AI & Society w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social + @teddyroland.bsky.social! We simulated 101 "AI authors" to see how LLMs imagine creativity & cultural distinction + compared them to real historical authors. What do AI authors want & how do they pursue success? link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New article in AI & Society with @richardjeanso.bsky.social and @hoytlong.bsky.social 🎉

We wanted to know how AI might affect cultural fields like literary publishing. But cultural production is complex! So we piloted a new method we call “social simulation.”

rdcu.be/eTkMy

New UChicago project explores how humanities can advance AI research Interdisciplinary group at the Neubauer Collegium to examine what generative AI reveals about humanistic knowledge and creativity

Honored to be part of this initiative to explore "Humanistic AI"! Hosted at the University of Chicago and led by @hoytlong.bsky.social and Chris Kennedy, we're collaborating in a series of interdisciplinary workshops and projects to think about how the humanities can contribute to AI and vice versa.

Expressions of interest: artificial intelligence humanities sandpits: Canada, UK and US AHRC and SSHRC invite expressions of interest to attend a humanities-led, interdisciplinary research sandpit looking to put humanities insights and methodologies at the heart of artificial intelligenc...

In case you missed it, this "Doing AI Differently" funding call should be of interest to humanities scholars with technical experience, computer scientists with humanities grounding, or anyone whose work spans both domains. Take a look and please consider applying! www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

Donald Trump does NOT want you to share this footage of his pathetically tiny birthday parade crowd.

Screenshot of the first page of preprint, "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research," by Lauren Klein, Meredith Martin, Andre Brock, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh, Jessica Marie Johnson, Lauren Tilton, and David Mimno

Excited to share our preprint "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research”

We're open to feedback—read & share thoughts!

@laurenfklein.bsky.social @mmvty.bsky.social @docdre.distributedblackness.net @mariaa.bsky.social @jmjafrx.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social

Aaaaah good timing, published today!

"we introduce Mini Worldlit, a manually curated dataset of 1,192 works of contemporary fiction from 13 countries, representing nine languages"

By @andrewpiper.bsky.social, @dbamman.bsky.social, Christina Han, Jens Bjerring-Hansen, @hoytlong.bsky.social, et al.

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Is it for himself? Or for Frog? Either way an ominous turn...

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If you're depressed that non-expert readers prefer AI-written poetry to the classics, perhaps try Matt's quiz.

You may discover that the real finding here is the huge gulf between your own taste and that of non-expert readers ... a gulf that has likely existed at least since, oh, IA Richards?

Thanks for setting this up! A 9/10 for me. I work with LLMs and literature, so I've learned some obvious tells. Limited diction, that preening, adolescent tone. LLMs just trying too hard to be "one with it all." The LLM poem in the style of Butler threw me off.

a man holding up a picture with the words there that 's my resume written below him ALT: a man holding up a picture with the words there that 's my resume written below him

Interested in writing with AI? ✍️

Please apply to be a **postdoc** in my group through the UChicago DSI Scholars program! 🤠

- Research in my group: minalee-research.github.io/research.html
- Application: datascience.uchicago.edu/research/pos... (review begins on Dec 6)

A photo of Boulder, Colorado, shot from above the university campus and looking toward the Flatirons.

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work with me at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for creative students with interests in #NLP and #CulturalAnalytics.

Boulder is a lovely college town 30 minutes from Denver and 1 hour from Rocky Mountain National Park 😎

Apply by December 15th!

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Internet studies people unite!

Internet studies starter pack is here - incomplete, skewed etc etc but some fantastic folks, to help us all rebuild our social networks. Happy to add you if I left you out! Please circulate, and here it is:
go.bsky.app/KHmxfWf

a close up of a woman wearing a necklace and a white shirt . ALT: a close up of a woman wearing a necklace and a white shirt .

AOC returning to BlueSky and you can feel the place light up...

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join my group in 2025-2026. If you like the mountains and interdisciplinary research that blends data and culture, this could be a good fit!

UW iSchool PhD apps due Dec 2nd: ischool.uw.edu/programs/phd...

More info about my group: melaniewalsh.org/mentorship

"Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my life looks like."

I don't ask Chat many personal questions, so it thinks I live a cozy, data-filled life. And well organized, too! Although wall-of-monitors is not my idea of cozy.

GitHub - bamman-group/ca-classification-data: Data and code to support "On Classification with Large Language Models in Cultural Analytics" Data and code to support "On Classification with Large Language Models in Cultural Analytics" - bamman-group/ca-classification-data

My group just finished up a new paper that I'm excited to get out into the world: "On Classification with Large Language Models in Cultural Analytics" (to be published at CHR): github.com/bamman-group...