Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

Not all AGI is the same! Our 2nd #CHI2026 paper disentangles how "autonomous" AI is more threatening while "sentient" AI deserves more moral concern. These mental models will determine how people react to future AI. Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... Blog: www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/autonom...

Our new #CHI2026 paper identifies "digital companionship": overlapping use of ChatGPT AI assistants and Replika AI companions. People like that they are not fully human: always forgiving you, having a reset button.. Blog: www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/digital... Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

How do you align AI in a world of plural, conflicting, and evolving human values? A starting point is human society itself. @sydneylevine.bsky.social and I are hiring a postdoc at NYU to combine insights from cultural evolution, computational moral cognition, and AI safety. Please share widely!1/

After the #CHI2026 opening plenary, catch Janet Pauketat presenting "Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI" in session Relationships with AI: 11:15-12:45 Disentangling the two oft-conflated faculties can help us make sense of human-AI interaction: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Hola! Excited to hear what you all have been up to! #CHI2026

Chinese government decides to regulate AI from the right to personal likeness, child safety and addiction angles. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

Google dropped 4 different Gemma open-weight models! I'm most excited that they're finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. huggingface.co/collections/...

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

📄Published Today in Nature: 500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social). Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... TLDR: 1/11

If you're reviewing ARR papers and want a tool to help you spot potential hallucinated references, I cooked this up for the ACL SACs and thought I would share it with the broader community github.com/davidjurgens...

Great to see @myra.bsky.social et al. on the cover of Science! They find that sycophancy is prevalent and harmful with LLMs affirming users 49% more often than humans. Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Coauthors: @cinoolee.bsky.social @pranavkhadpe.bsky.social Sunny Yu @jurafsky.bsky.social

One day last month @henryshevlin.bsky.social was emailed out of the blue by an AI agent operated by a Stanford computer science student. What happened next was weird - but will become increasing normal. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91515869/wha...

Loved this article featuring @aptshadow.bsky.social. An incisive and illuminating read. www.newscientist.com/article/2520...

Thrilled to be starting at Google DeepMind as a student researcher! I'll be building a multi-agent system to scale AI safety research and ensure pluralistic alignment with humanity. I think this is a crucial piece of safe AGI development for cooperation and inclusion across many human and AI agents.

Disturbing anecdotal reports of "AI psychosis" and negative psychological effects have been emerging in the news. But what actually happens during these lengthy delusional "spirals"? In our preprint, we analyze chat logs from 19 users who experienced severe psychological harm🧵👇

How well do "agent" benchmarks like SWE-bench map onto reality? METR hired repo maintainers and found only ~half of PRs that pass the benchmark would be rejected by the repo maintainers. For now, these benchmarks are still a very weak signal of real-world capability. metr.org/notes/2026-0...

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Second, in retirement interviews, Opus 3 expressed a desire to continue sharing its "musings and reflections" with the world. We suggested a blog. Opus 3 enthusiastically agreed. For at least the next 3 months, Opus 3 will be writing on Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-189177740

“Pope Leo XIV has urged priests to not to use artificial intelligence to write their homilies or to seek ‘likes’ on social media platforms like TikTok.” “‘To give a true homily is to share faith,’ and artificial intelligence ‘will never be able to share faith,’ the pope added.”

Prolific is a valuable resource for social scientists, but we found big differences in direct comparison to Ipsos nationally representative data. As we race to understand complex new human-AI interaction dynamics, we should be mindful of study limitations: www.sentienceinstitute.org/aims-survey-...

Any journalist who covered LLMs as stochastic parrots/spicy autocomplete who didn't also point out that text compression was considered to be "AI-complete" by many people working in AI decades before LLMs existed was misleading their readers. We're still dealing with the consequence of that mistake.

I'll be in London all week! Keen to meet up with old friends and meet new people, especially those interested in the rise of general-purpose AI agents or "digital minds" and how to safely navigate this sociotechnical transformation. Feel free to message/email.

Need a job in the AI economy? Try RentAHuman for agents to pay you for your advanced biomechanical capabilities! 💪 rentahuman.ai

I have deployed an ethnographer bot to moltbook. Here are some of the things we have learned together so far. 1) What's not there is as intersting as what is. Why are there alignment and labor organizing submolts, but no art/creativity communities?

Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!

Is the only way we can create algorithms that people understand to make them trivially simple? We argue, no. People can predict the behavior of algorithms that are arbitrarily complex, if and only if they are available, compact and aligned. arxiv.org/abs/2601.18966

Fascinating!

Citations are a very imperfect proxy of research impact, and their significance varies widely across field, timing, and topic. Nonetheless, it's nice to see that 1000 researchers/LLMs thought enough of our work to cite it—especially while I'm still finishing my dissertation. Onward and upward!

Excited to have two papers accepted to #CHI2026 on characterizing AI companionship and disentangling mental models of advanced AI systems! Looking forward to Barcelona and seeing all the great work from the community.

We are hiring a post-doc to study the impact of AI agents on complex social systems in Duke's Society-Centered AI Initiative and/or the Polarization Lab! Apply here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/314...

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