I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology.
The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome.
Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷
"The constitution is not a neutral charter standing above the firm but, rather, a company document that prioritizes its mission, market position, safety research, and normative influence all at once."
Lisa Klaassen and Ralph Schroeder detail their criticisms of Claude's Constitution.
Join us for a Bellwether Lecture! 🔔
University of Michigan School of Information Assistant Professor azjacobs.bsky.social will discuss structure, governance, and inequality in sociotechnical systems & hidden assumptions in machine learning.
📅 April 8, 12:10-1:30 pm
📍 210 South Hall & Online
Excellent, important, and clarifying.
Historian of computing Kevin Baker teaches us about the history of aerial targeting. And, Baker says, contra news accounts, Anthropic and Claude didn't select the Minab girls' school as a target. @kevinbaker.bsky.social
Well put: “Formal review persists, but substantive discretion has migrated upstream…When objectives are embedded in architecture, administrative errors and political misjudgments are operationalized at scale.
What appears as a dispute about fairness is therefore a deeper institutional misalignment”
AI systems aren’t just supporting decisions—they’re structuring how public authority is exercised, writes Michael A. Santoro. “Human in the loop” isn’t enough. Accountability must be built upstream through guardrails embedded in system design, not added after the fact, he argues.
Was able to catch a bit! Always love an excuse to follow @jessicahullman.bsky.social ‘s work. An abuse of terms and questionable summary: the bigger picture is about type 3 errors - there’s lots of LLM work to solve ill-posed questions, when we could ask better questions / do better soc sci instead!
Coarsely summarizing perspectives on the bureaucratic culture of language models by @himself.bsky.social, @azjacobs.bsky.social, and Lily Chumley.
!!
If you have any interest in the future of AI, please join us for another really insightful conversation with @alondra.bsky.social. She's brilliant but better yet, she's right!
(modesty also requires I acknowledge this idiosyncratic phrasing from my one of my earliest mentors and coauthors!)
and @morganklauss.bsky.social Madeleine Pape @alexhanna.bsky.social's important work on auto-essentialization, putting AI as governance in historical context
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
to forthcoming work from Fanna Gamal in Calif Law Review (2026) studyofhate.ucla.edu/the-legal-re...
But the stakes! are! high!
From Julie E. Cohen, theorizing on the actors behind the scenes and their political and economic relations papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
This picks up an earlier thread from @alisongopnik.bsky.social @himself.bsky.social Cosma Shalizi & James Evans -- AI as cultural technology. www.science.org/doi/full/10....
AI as governance -- @himself.bsky.social on how AI reshapes markets, bureaucracy, democracy...and culture. Very happy ot see this getting the mainstream social science treatment.
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... I can't believe I missed this paper coming out!
Wow! Sounds like a huge decision and a wonderful outcome. Good luck with the move!
Feeling so excited + grateful to be representing this paper at #ICML! Please stop by to talk about how to do more valid measurement for evaling gen AI systems!
Work led by the incomparable @hannawallach.bsky.social and @azjacobs.bsky.social as a part of Microsoft’s AI and Society initiative!!
“If ___ ran a mini nuclear power plant” seems like a strong vibe for the day
As ever, Tressie McMillan Cottom has the most astute analysis of how to read Musk's behavior. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/o...
"The bureaucracy is an “unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government, which has, in a lot of ways, currently, more power than any elected representative,” insisted Mr. Musk, who serves as an unelected appointee with vast reach across the government."
cool
big day to submit an article on how "efficiency" is used to undermine legitimacy of the administrative state
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/u... (gift link)
Oh of course good people know each other
Thrilled to have you here regardless !
(Bonus rant for the enshittification of search. Me trying to fix my house, sample AI suggestions from recent tasks: “use vinegar.” “Not flammable since the 80s!”
…more clicks to experts: “OMFG do not fucking use vinegar.” “Yes still flammable so many people died that way”)
This! Not that individualizing the problem is the solution, but so many don’t know how big of a jump it is. Also: bring back lmgtfy (let me google that for you) as a design intervention
"there's a lot of qualitative work that goes into designing quantitative metrics" -- @azjacobs.bsky.social
"how do we translate between benchmark performance and what it will really be like to use a model" -- Su Lin Blodgett
"Overall, the starting list constitutes at best a narrow coverage of the risks the technology is likely to pose, & at worst a (partial) red herring poised to direct significant risk mitigation efforts to building on inappropriate foundations." @yjernite.bsky.social et al on the AI Act Systemic Risks
