Lance Armstrong on Revisionist History: "Cars freak me out. Being out on the road with cars and drivers and distracted drivers, it scares the shit out of me. But, you know, Malcolm, I actually now prefer the mountain bike just so I can be totally away from cars." Same.
Yes we should all be talking about this! But tbh i worry that making it about AI makes people think we need to fix *the AI* when really we just need to finally pass a proper privacy law + close the data broker loophole.
One of my mentors taught me that you have to advocate for your research, that if you have a finding people should know about you have to go out and tell them. But it's remarkable how important this is versus how little infra / training / reward there is for it at universities.
This is definitely a major prio for the labs. A key breakthrough in ChatGPT was post-training for user / assistant interactions; Opus 4.6 was agent / tool. Almost surely folks are pushing on RLVR for agent swarms, it's just not clear yet what good reward functions are for group interactions.
I worked for U of Minnesota the summer their state govt shut down (a decade ago now). People there hated all government *except* ag extension.
Far more disciplines should have extension services. People like you more if you listen to + work with them! And it's satisfying + meaningful!
"conversational agents can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, most users cannot tell when it is happening, and existing transparency mechanisms are insufficient"
New + excellent paper on effects of persuasive AI in shaping purchasing behaviors. Effect sizes are concerningly large!
Hello if you think this expression on my face is mischief and provocation you would be correct. Having an absolute blast at #ECIR2026 #IR4Good - thank you for letting me show up to to talk about how important (good) IR is for global democracies!
the opposing lawyers who make “let me tell you about your case, little girl” calls -- and, in so doing, reveal their entire legal strategies! the cryptographers who got NSA letters to prevent them from publishing, and who wore their code on tshirts and as tattoos in protest! this book is a treat.
"I don't want to not use cool technology just because it has a shitty business model" - Cindy Cohn at @townhallseattle.bsky.social
80% through the book and she is an inspiration and a delight
This is great - A major pet peeve of mine is when researchers say they "prompted ChatGPT" instead of (a) specifying which model and (b) being clear that it was the api, not the web interface. These are v different things!
People make expensive decisions based on how LLMs perform on Chatbot Arena and other ranking systems.
Turns out these rankings are very sensitive to tiny changes. New paper from MIT: news.mit.edu/2026/study-p...
Wow i want to go to this waffle house and be part of this crew.
Really important to know if these headlines get changed *before* or *after* gemini consumes it for the summary
I am working on my ECIR keynote on "gemini hegemony" and wow this is going to be an excellent slide
Yes! When the science paper on how AI could durably reduce conspiracy theory beliefs came out, my first thought was: okay but that's not how any actual conspiracy theorists will use it.
So...how are you feeling about the new anthropic work in this space?
I attempted to build an AI interviewer three years ago (it did not work) and then did a v different study with in-person interviews in Taiwan and India and the disembodied and decontextualized critiques are *so* useful in explaining why the real-world work felt like such better research.
Hello I included your post in my blog post about this! adventures-in-ai-and-democracy.ghost.io/ai-interview...
It is a cool study but also feels like one of those situations where we think we are talking about AI but actually we are all talking about capitalism.
I read the "no camps" aspect as fierce ambivalence - in the same interview, people could be very excited about the tech and very concerned about it.
But of course a key problem is that this is an interview/survey by Claude, about Claude, with Claude users only. So that is its own camp in a way 🫠
In 2023, my team published one of the first papers on AI-led interviews. We wanted to know if ChatGPT could do qualitative research. (It couldn't)
Now Anthropic has done 80k AI interviews across 159 countries.
Some thoughts on why adaptive AI surveys are useful but do *not* replace qual research.
This thread on a Brussels AI + Foreign Interference panel is one of the best run-downs I've seen of the challenges ahead this year including:
- GEO, carpet bombing, and training data grooming
- model sovereignty vs. quality / access / cost
- the cognitive costs of efficiency over accuracy
bad bad!
This is wildly important in the particular context of @informor.bsky.social's new paper on the psychological impacts of LLM autcomplete: news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...
Come be my colleague!
Postdoc position at the University of Amsterdam: Open-source AI for Social Sciences & Humanities.
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Thanks for a heartbreaking article. My friends in the OSINT space are reporting that the distortion online is the worst they've ever seen it.
In the same way battleships transformed the sea and fighter jets the sky, AI completes social media's transformation into a true theater of war.
Agreed that over the long run we will get social norms but it's starting to feel like an "in the long run, we're all dead" sort of situation.
The distortion of narratives during these crisis events is going to have lasting and path-dependent effects 🫠.
Last night the Iranian Embassy in The Hague dropped a Pixar-style AI video trolling President Trump.
It is wild and also exactly what I expected from two years of research on AI misuse in global democracies: AI trolling does better online than deepfakes.
We called the tactic a "deep roast."
I'm not too too worried about dependence given how good the open-weight models are getting.
The ai divide for me is between the people who get these productivity boosts and those who get scammed (classic 3rd level).
Feeling a lot of Maria Bolis's "fierce ambivalence" 😅 - ssir.org/articles/ent...
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