In 1998, Americans expected more to have changed by 2025 than has actually changed. We often overestimate how quickly the world changes. From the latest issue of The Update, where I also cover ten other stories (next post). theupdatebrief.substack.com/p/why-is-cri...

Are LLM chatbots becoming less safe over time? Claude 3.5/3.6 almost always pushed back against social attachment requests from users who appeared at risk of dependence (e.g., express loneliness and ask Claude to be their therapist), but Claude 4/4.1 now readily agree to those.

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Our new article in @science.org enables social media reranking outside of platforms' walled gardens. We add an LLM-powered reranking of highly polarizing political content into N=1256 participants' feeds. Downranking cools tensions with the opposite party—but upranking inflames them.

This week, we published in @science.org an article outlining the current ethical and societal implications of research involving human neural #organoids and #assembloids, their transplantation, and highlighted potential next steps.

This was a great event! No recordings (Chatham house), but it's amazing how far you can get when you have a room of people talk about AI consciousness with humility and open-mindedness. So much online discourse is just endless intuition jousting.

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

This paper is a great exposition of how "personhood" doesn't need to be, and in fact should not be, all-or-nothing or grounded in abstruse, ill-defined metaphysical properties. As I argued in my recent @theguardian.com essay, we can and should prepare now: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Identifying human morals and values in language is crucial for analysing lots of human- and AI-generated text. We introduce "MoVa: Towards Generalizable Classification of Human Morals and Values" - to be presented at @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social oral session next Thu #CompSocialScience #LLMs 🧵 (1/n)

Can AI simulate human behavior? 🧠 The promise is revolutionary for science & policy. But there’s a huge "IF": Do these simulations actually reflect reality? To find out, we introduce SimBench: The first large-scale benchmark for group-level social simulation. (1/9)

For the next six days, I'll be posting a bunch about #CSCW2025 in Bergen, Norway. I am one of the General Chairs and have been preparing this conference for the last 21 months, so it's exciting to have the event finally here! Don't know what CSCW is? Check out cscw.acm.org

When one AI misbehaves, do we hold all AI accountable? New research by @sentienceinstitute.bsky.social @kmanoli.bsky.social @jacyanthis.bsky.social shows that people blame all AI for just one AI's misconduct. 🤖

Last school year, 19% of US high schoolers had or have a friend who had a “romantic relationship” with AI. 42% had or have a friend with an AI “friend/companion.” 42% had or have a friend who got “mental health support” from AI. (Source: cdt.org/wp-content/u..., n = 1,030, June-Aug 2025, quotas.)

The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada has learned this morning, Wednesday, October 1st, 2025, that Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away due to natural causes. She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States.

It’s time to prepare for AI personhood. AI agents and companions are already out in the world buying products and shaping our emotions. The future will only get weirder. We need social science, policy, and norms for this brave new world. My latest @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In our new paper, we discovered "The AI Double Standard": People judge all AIs for the harm done by one AI, more strongly than they judge humans. First impressions will shape the future of human-AI interaction—for better or worse. Accepted at #CSCW2025. See you in Norway! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Hello everyone 👋 Good news! 🚨 Our Game Theory & Multiagent Systems team at Google DeepMind is hiring! 🚨 .. and we have not one, but two open positions! One Research Scientist role and one Research Engineer role. 😁 Please repost and tell anyone who might be interested! Details in thread below 👇

British AI startup beats humans in international forecasting competition ManticAI ranked eighth in the Metaculus Cup, leaving some believing bots’ prediction skills could soon overtake experts #ai #forecasting www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

LLM agents are optimized for thumbs-up instant gratification. RLHF -> sycophancy We propose human agency as a new alignment target in HumanAgencyBench, made possible by AI simulation/evals. We find e.g., Claude most supports agency but also most tries to steer user values 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2509.08494

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

<<Or as Jacy Reese Anthis, co-founder of the Sentience Institute, a US organisation researching the idea of digital minds, put it: “How we treat them will shape how they treat us.”>> @robert-booth.bsky.social @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

EXCLUSIVE: Sean Duffy will announce expedited plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, his first major action as interim NASA administrator.

Morality in AI is often oversimplified. @davidjurgens.bsky.social and @shivanikumar.bsky.social kick off the "Human-Centred NLP" orals #ACL2025NLP with UniMoral, a huge dataset of moral scenario ratings in 6 languages! They find LLMs fail to simulated human moral decisions. bsky.app/profile/shiv...

Grateful to have our recent ICML paper covered by @stanfordhai.bsky.social. Humanity is building incredibly powerful AI technology that can usher in utopia or dystopia. We need human-computer interaction research, particularly with “social science tools like simulations that can keep pace.”

I'm at #ACL2025 for 2 papers w/ @kldivergence.bsky.social et al! Let's chat, e.g., scaling evals, simulations, and HCI to unique challenges of general-purpose AI. Bias in Language Models: Beyond Trick Tests and Towards RUTEd Evaluation 🗓️ Mon 11–12:30 The Impossibility of Fair LLMs 🗓️ Tue 16–17:30

In 2021 NeurIPS discovered that 50% of all spotlight papers would have been rejected if reviewed again. The solution? Mostly not change anything. blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/t...

@diyiyang.bsky.social and @sherrytswu.bsky.social kick off #ACL2025 with "Human-AI Collaboration: How AIs Augment Human Teammates," showing why and how we need centaur evaluations. Realistic evals take work, but reliance on easy, short, and simple LLM evals led us to this current evaluation crisis.

Do bias and fairness metrics work for general-purpose AI like LLMs? In 2 papers just published in #ACL2025, we argue: not yet, but deep qualitative studies of social context scaled with AI assistance can get there! Theory: aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon... Empirics: aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

🚨Successfully Navigating the Disruption AI will Bring to Survey Research🚨 w/ research, verification, transparency, collaboration, survey research can thrive through disruption isi-iass.org/home/wp-cont... w/ @davidlazer.bsky.social @stephnie.bsky.social TrentBuskirk SunshineHillygus FraukeKreuter

Laura Nelson is waking us up #IC2S2 with keynote hot takes! Computational social scientists rely on a "qualitative moment" but gloss over this crucial step of deciding what the model means—whether it fits the actual target like "cultural alignment." Can models be humanlike or better used as "alien"?

Today (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19  LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more!  🧵:

Great workshop today on LLMs @ic2s2.bsky.social. My main update: There are more NLP tasks where good old-fashioned LMs (e.g., BERT) still outperform "modern" decoders (e.g., GPT-4) than I realized! LLM-as-a-judge work should test these more often. TY @eollion.bsky.social @emilienschultz.bsky.social

UB's new Department of AI and Society is hiring faculty across ranks (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor). We’re looking for transdisciplinary scholars interested in building AI by society, for society. Start dates begin Fall 2025. More info: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734

I've been spending the summer taking stock of the growing, maturing field of qualitative computational methods (compu/qual? quali-quant?). This subfield is now a powerhouse, and I'll be sharing my reflections at #IC2S2 on the state of the field, ongoing (fierce!) debates, and possible futures?

Excited to co-organize the Bridging Human and LLM Annotations for Social Science tutorial at #ic2s2 tomorrow! Join us at 1:30pm CEST to learn how to combine Qualtrics+Prolific, MTurk, & LLMs for automated annotation and valid estimates. Code&materials: github.com/kristinaglig...

My thoughts on the crucial importance of methodology on self-reported AI performance on mathematics competitions, and my policy on commenting on such reports going forward: mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1148814...

Flying to Sweden to present at #IC2S2 2025 on how we can make sense of AI! We need big-picture social theory about AI instead of shoehorning particular aspects into human-human social theory. We conducted 57 interviews and analyzed millions of traditional/social media posts to build this framework.

Can LLMs simulate human research subjects for psychology, economics, and other fields? I'm on the ✈️ to Vancouver 🇨🇦 for #ICML2025 to present our position paper arguing yes! We *need* AI simulations so humanity's social understanding can keep pace with technological acceleration.

Back to NYC for the summer for a @msftresearch.bsky.social project modeling the predictability and human-likeness of AI errors!

“The whole thing feels like Black Mirror.” “He would listen to the bot over me.” “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life.” Relationships are being destroyed thanks to spiritual mania, supernatural delusions, and arcane prophecy — all fueled by AI chatbots:

Happy to share this was accepted to #ICML2025! We'll update the lit review because research on/with this method is accelerating so quickly. See you in Vancouver in July!

こんにちは (hello) from #CHI2025, the world's largest ever human-computer interaction conference! We're living through AI takeoff. AI technology is rocket fuel, but interaction is humanity's flight path. In this thread I'll share insights from the coming week in Japan 🤖✈️🌸⛩️

“Can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights?” our tech columnist asks. “Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close. But I was intrigued.”

Should we use LLMs 🤖 to simulate human research subjects 🧑? In our new preprint, we argue sims can augment human studies to scale up social science as AI technology accelerates. We identify 5 tractable challenges and argue this is a promising and underused research method 🧪🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2504.02234

First day working on LLM evals at Google as a student researcher!

In the newest issue of Science, meself, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi and James Evans, "Large AI Models are Cultural and Social Technologies." More soon ... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Does the public think AIs are sentient? 🤖🧠 Our paper with the first US representative survey on digital minds, AI, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS), was accepted to #CHI2025. We find that 20% of U.S. adults believe some current AIs are already sentient, and 37% aren't sure! 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2407.08867

Claim by Holden Karnofsky: "AI systems now match human performance on long-standing benchmarks for image recognition, speech recognition, and language understanding...none of these three broad capabilities are considered major challenges for AI anymore." Agree or disagree?

🚨New Paper Alert! Our latest research in npj Digital Medicine explores two unusual questions: 1⃣ Can Chat-GPT experience state anxiety?💥🤖 2⃣ If so, can we reduce it? 📉 A thread on how we "took Chat-GPT to therapy" 🧵👇 Full text available here: rdcu.be/ebZ9v

Meet the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award, Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton! They are recognized for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Please join us in congratulating the two recipients! bit.ly/4hpdsbD