I do not like writing abstracts for articles. How tempting it would be to give this task to an LLM. But an abstract isn't only a summary. It freshly articulates an argument that took 8,000 words to write in just 150 words. It signals the most powerful ideas, not simply the most frequent ideas.

<3 I remain so happy and humbled that "In the Land of the Unreal" won the Bateson prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and was an honorable mention for the Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. It was a good year for this book that I worked so hard on.

FWIW, the jury is still out on Gen AI being good at text summaries. Because it shortens & emphasizes text based on distribution, not meaning, it’s less of a summary (ie, salient points highlighted) than a compression (ie, the most frequently asserted terms in the distribution). Not the same thing!

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

We do not have to offer and I believe indeed should not offer any benefit of the doubt: Anything sold as "AI" should be presumed ineffective, exploitative, environmentally ruinous, bigotry-amplifying and otherwise until proven otherwise. /fin

totally normal for a flailing social media company and a nuclear fusion company to merge. definitely not corruption. nope nope nope.

I wrote 1200 fun words today! Here's how they end: "For those of us concerned with the rise of technofascism, there is critical potential in short circuiting the pathways by which authority is seized via proximity to scientific thought."

Here we go! @lmesseri.bsky.social & I wrote about epistemic risks of synthetic participants ('AI Surrogates') in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (see 🧵 here) bsky.app/profile/mjcr...

Sorry, doing research with humans is hard! There isn't going to be a magical technology that makes it easier. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I recently published about the risks of AI Surrogates, and why they are so appealing... See thread on the paper: bsky.app/profile/lmes...

"We face a social dilemma around the role of these empathy machines. Those who are most cognitively vulnerable may turn to these tools when what they most need is a flesh-and-blood human who will care for them, not sycophantically, but with thick empathy arising from the experience of being human."

Ten years ago.

I started this project because I was dissatisfied with scientific research and public discourse about “empathy machines” that began with virtual reality a decade ago, and has accelerated since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022. 2/

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Or better yet: make GenAI about an assault on civics. Because if you are selling a product that necessarily attempts to con one person into believing they are engaging with another person when they are not, you’re not just ruining education. You’re dismantling society’s foundations in social trust.

So the next time someone tries to draw you into a conversation about that piece they saw on 60 Minutes or read in the NYT about how educators are coping with/ combatting/whatever students using GenAI, don’t accept that framing. Make it about the industry that is impoverishing their education.

In a stroke of good timing, my article excoriating the metaverse (and taking shots at spatial computing) was just accepted at Games & Culture. How do these companies make implausible and undesirable futures seem inevitable? abstract posted here!

Um, if an LLMs's tendancy to lie and cheat isn't something that can be stopped, maybe this isn't a great product to incorporate at every level of our professional and personal lives?

There are many good arguments for why AI/ML will struggle to predict replicability. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... I'm curious why, in light of these arguments and now data, COS is continuing to pursue this project.

"We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!”" -Ray Bradbury, The Veldt. Or, the 1950 version of "touch grass"

This is HUGE news, that was reported right before Thanksgiving. I just looked online and, sure enough, all the grants that our PhD students normally apply for are not accepting applications this cycle. Maybe they will come back, maybe they won't. But right now, this is a devastating set back.

Tragic. This funded my dissertation research and many of the students in our program.

i'm staring into the future forged by "AI scientists" and, my friends, it is bleak. Humans might be slow and expensive, but let's all just agree that this trade off is worth it, m'kay?

My amazing department is hiring a Linguistic Anthropologist! careercenter.americananthro.org/job/707272/a...

Now that #AAA2025 is a wrap—time for an award 🏆 thread! Congratulations @lmesseri.bsky.social for winning this year's Gregory Bateson Book Prize!! Awarded for In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles. More info here @dukepress.bsky.social: dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...

🥰🥰🥰

#AAA2025 has been its usual whirlwind of fun and overwhelm. But I can’t underscore how much it has meant for ‘in the land of the unreal’ to be recognized as the winner of the Bateson book prize, and to celebrate the news w my ever growing anthro fam. @dukepress.bsky.social @culanth.bsky.social

excellently timed for the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. Fill your feeds, folks at #AAA2025

I would really like tech reporters to actually test of this products and see if they accomplish what they company says they will, instead of just running ad copy.

absolutely. which is why this was the definition for AI that @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I included in our recent TiCS article

This NeurIPS workshop claims that LLMs "provide an important foundation for exploring human cognition, emotion, and social interaction" This is flawed logic, as @lmesseri.bsky.social and I argue here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to welcome @lmesseri.bsky.social, @cameronbuckner.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com to campus a week from today for the “AI and the Nature of Science: Concepts and Controversies” event. 14.11.25, 1400 - 1800.

Pop-up AI defacing your article critical of AI captures a lot of what it feels like to work in this space. @lmesseri.bsky.social

Important work revealing limitations of using LLMs as human surrogates. Note, however, that even if LLMs' textual outputs were perfectly human-like, they would still be poor models of human cognition, as @lmesseri.bsky.social argue here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Yesterday's NYTimes platforming of the heinous perspective that women have ruined the workforce was bad. But to post a photo of the the winner of the Great British Bake Off first thing Friday morning? Have you no respect for your readers?

Yale Anthropology is doing an open rank search for environmental anthropology. Happy to answer questions in DMs (I am not on the search committee). We’re a lovely department (imo) and given the current higher ed atmosphere, Yale has been doing a decent job at getting us thru (knock on wood).

I am participating and reviewing submissions for this workshop. so let's get some interesting proposals here, yeah? If you are an STSer/anthropologist working on how AI is changing ideas and practices in the sciences, would love to have you in the conversation.

I don't write about outer space much these days, but I do have two new essays out on the topic. The first is a short afterward for a recent collection of critical outer space studies. I wonder why our space imagination has become so narrow and draw inspiration from NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy

Yay! Out now!! Thanks to @lmesseri.bsky.social @niiyokamigaabaw.bsky.social, Alexandra Ganser, Stefanie Dunning, Natalie Treviño, Matt Harvey and Frédéric Boone for their wonderful contributions and afterwords!

For the Minnesotans out there, see post below for upcoming book talk! My host, @justcode.bsky.social, wrote a lovely review of my book right when it came out. Also it's the final days of the @dukepress.bsky.social Fall book sale (thru Nov 9). Use FALL25 code on the press website to get 50% off!

Some Sunday reading, if you are so inclined (open access pre-print linked in the thread comments 👇

Love it, seasonally appropriate, no notes

stubbled across a short NYT piece by Toni Morrison from 1973. This line stood out: "For this year fantasy itself lost its genuineness. The normal lines of communication between sham and reality had broken down."

Spotted on LinkedIn... a bad AI summary of our new paper on risks of AI in research. Please make it stop.

'New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.' 1/2

I’ll say it straight: It is unbecoming, undignified, cowardly, and shameful for a institution as revered and respected as the University of Virginia to grant an audience in 2025 to those who are committed to destroying science, free thought, human rights, and the rule of law.

A new article by @lmesseri.bsky.social and @mjcrockett.bsky.social whose crucial work on the illusion of scientific understanding among AI zealots cannot be taught and discussed enough! We look forward to reading this new work.

Another brave article by @lmesseri.bsky.social and @mjcrockett.bsky.social . Essential reading if you care about the harm AI celebrationism is doing!

This study shouldn't have been necessary. In fucking cognitive science, no less. I'd say I couldn't believe it, but @avastmachine.bsky.social showed the historical connections in his book The Closed World. But since it was necessary, I'm very glad it happened. Will cog sci pay sufficient attn?

This is the way (for me). Piloted it with my graduate seminar this semester. I've been marking reading responses by hand, returning them the following session. Unlike what i had been doing for my whole career, which was feeling like i had to mark immediately and return through Canvas.

OpenAI: Hallucinations are mathematically inevitable. Also OpenAI: here's an AI web browser. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/t...