When you ask ChatGPT or any popular LLM to tell you a story, one name keeps coming up: "Elias Thorne." Depending which chatbot you ask, he's a lighthousekeeper, clockmaker or explorer. His stories are also flooding Amazon's AI-generated book market, YouTube slop, and fake news. Who is he?

We're in a strange situation rn where Google can train freely on books from university libraries—but researchers *at* universities have limited access. I'm optimistic this can be fixed, but if you're in admin or working at a foundation, please know: univs are failing here & resources are needed.

"Community Notes" are reshaping how millions encounter information on social media--but what makes them work (or not)? We term these "Crowdsourced Context Systems" (CCS) and introduce a framework for designing and evaluating them in a new #CHI26 paper 🧵

Interesting new statistical analysis, again confirming that mandatory electronic monitoring in trucking—ostensibly a safety measure—led to *increased* accident and fatality rates after implementation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I used to focus on left versus right. Now I’m much more worried about the money at the top. But while it might seem strange to say it, I think this is a hopeful way of looking at the world that opens the door to coalitions that seemed impossible before. My first for the @newrepublic.com:

I am presenting a new 📝 “Bias Delayed is Bias Denied? Assessing the Effect of Reporting Delays on Disparity Assessments” at @facct.bsky.social on Thursday, with @aparnabee.bsky.social, Derek Ouyang, @allisonkoe.bsky.social, @marzyehghassemi.bsky.social, and Dan Ho. 🔗: arxiv.org/abs/2506.13735 (1/n)

I am so excited to be in 🇬🇷Athens🇬🇷 to present "A Framework for Auditing Chatbots for Dialect-Based Quality-of-Service Harms" by me, @kizilcec.bsky.social, and @allisonkoe.bsky.social, at #FAccT2025!! 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04419

Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.

New NEH-supported tutorial on running LLMs locally with ollama! Your laptop is more powerful than you think. Save money, privacy, and energy. aiforhumanists.com/tutorials/

I'm joining Wisconsin CS as an assistant professor in fall 2026!! There, I'll continue working on language models, computational social science, & responsible AI. 🌲🧀🚣🏻‍♀️ Apply to be my PhD student! Before then, I'll postdoc for a year in the NLP group at another UW 🏔️ in the Pacific Northwest

For the HTR and OCR crew: New paper by Jonathan Bourne. He's been working to help DLOC handle OCR for a whole bunch of Caribbean historical newspapers. "Scrambled text: fine-tuning language models for OCR error correction using synthetic data" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Slightly paraphrasing @oms279.bsky.social during his talk at #COMPTEXT2025: "The single most important use case for LLMs in sociology is turning unstructured data into structured data." Discussing his recent work on codebooks, prompts, and information extraction: osf.io/preprints/so...

Hi everyone, I am excited to share our large-scale survey study with 800+ researchers, which reveals researchers’ usage and perceptions of LLMs as research tools, and how the usage and perceptions differ based on demographics. See results in comments! 🔗 Arxiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.05025

[New preprint!] Do Chinese AI Models Speak Chinese Languages? Not really. Chinese LLMs like DeepSeek are better at French than Cantonese. Joint work with Unso Jo and @dmimno.bsky.social . Link to paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00289 🧵

You’ve probably heard about how AI/LLMs can solve Math Olympiad problems ( deepmind.google/discover/blo... ). So naturally, some people put it to the test — hours after the 2025 US Math Olympiad problems were released. The result: They all sucked!

*NEW DATASET AND PAPER* (CHI2025): How are online communities responding to AI-generated content (AIGC)? We study this by collecting and analyzing the public rules of 300,000+ subreddits in 2023 and 2024. 1/

hey it's that time of year again, when people start to wonder whether AIES is actually happening and when this year’s paper deadline might be if so! anyone know anything about the ACM/AAAI conference on AI Ethics & Society for 2025? (I used to ask about this every year on Twitter haha.)

Best Student Paper at #AIES 2024 went to @andreawwenyi.bsky.social! Annotating gender-biased narratives in the courtroom is a complex, nuanced task with frequent subjective decision-making by legal experts. We asked: What do experts desire from a language model in this annotation process?

How do LLMs represent relationships between languages? By studying the embedding layers of XLM-R and mT5, we find they are highly interpretable. LLMs can find semantic alignment as an emergent property! Joint work with @dmimno.bsky.social. 🧵