excited to share that i'll be pursuing my phd in computer science at @csail.mit.edu starting this fall 🥳 🎓 i'm so grateful to be coadvised by the literal dream team: Jacob Andreas, @mbakker.bsky.social, and @mitchellgordon.bsky.social 🙌

My first last-author paper is out! If you saw this dog below and someone showed you the second image, would you consider them the same word/concept? (more examples in Ada's thread) We study if VLMs agree with humans on this and revisit old questions around shape vs. texture bias in vision

Thoughts on metascientific consequences of AI-generated slides & ideas diluting the impression that speakers are commited to what they present. Science runs on personal attachment more than we admit. If it were a cake mix, how wouldn we add back an egg? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/28/w...

📢 Our paper 🤯🧠 "Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks" has been accepted at the ACM Fairness, Accountability & Transparency (FAccT) conference 2026. The preprint is available: 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2605.03512 TL;DR 🧵 follows 👇 1/5

Can you boost your AI review scores by asking an LLM to rewrite your paper? Yes! We call it paper laundering Our @icmlconf.bsky.social spotlight paper argues current AI reviewers aren't ready to automate peer review, and outlines what a science of peer review automation should look like 🧵👇 #ICML2026

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

Our position paper, "AI Welfare Is Bullshit" just got accepted to ICML 2026 @icmlconf.bsky.social! The AI welfare agenda has already begun to attract institutional investment at organizations such an @anthropic.com. We argue that this idea is essentially Frankfurtian Bullshit.

Designating that most uses of the term "goblin" and "gremlin" are not legitimate while designating most uses of the word "frog" as legitimate is the imposition of a set of values on a technology. Why do a small number of people in Silicon Valley get to decide whether goblins are inappropriate?

Patrick Sui and I are hosting an #ICLR2026 social for anyone with background/interest in the humanities! Room 210, 12-1:30pm on Friday 24 April!! Humanities-adjacent, humanities-curious, everyone is welcome! Should be a fun group! :)

Flying out of Boston to Brazil rn means I’m surrounded by poster tubes (ICLR attendees) and blue athletic gear w medals (Boston marathoners). It’s a cool crowd

I'll be presenting OvertonBench at #ICLR2026 in Rio later this week! 📍Sat, Apr 25, 10:30am in Pavilion 4 (#4109) Please DM me if you'd like to chat about pluralistic / value alignment, societal impacts, epistemology, fairness, evals, etc

Congratulations to Jacob Andreas, was named a 2026 Edgerton Award recipient! The award recognizes exceptional teaching, research, and service at MIT! Prof. Andreas co-leads our Language and Thought Mission, and he is a dedicated and creative researcher and educator. news.mit.edu/2026/jacob-a...

My Hoya Rebecca put out the cutest teeny lil flowers today and I’m obsessed

Tech industry mottos have a mixed track record. But we should hold idealists to their ideals. And we should celebrate when they come through. The Mythos non-release is a remarkable moment of conviction. Thoughts: davidbau.com/archives/20... Bravo to Anthropic's "race the top".

Democracy isn't a rulebook. It runs on daily interactions where people comply with norms and hold each other accountable. AI agents are about to join that system. We need to build them to read it. New paper with Rakshit Trivedi and Dylan Hadfield-Menell.

Rebuttal season is here, yey🤞 With many asking me, I compiled the most common misconceptions Hope the tips help 🧵 All tips: docs.google.com/document/d/14Wax8M5w8F_8miDlYJ9-I6wqpelxlXjCEUbkNzNMqqE/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.rfq27f356vmm #AI 🤖📈🧠

New important (I hope) resource for academics working in this area.

For a recent lab meeting, I wrote up a grab bag of ways to think about your development as a researcher during a PhD: emerge-lab.github.io/papers/an-un... Sharing in case folks find it useful or have feedback!

🥁🥁🥁 Newly out from us today in Science Advances: “Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users’ Attitudes on Societal Issues”. Large Language Models are providing users with autocomplete writing suggestions on many platforms. Could these suggestions shift users’ own attitudes? (spoiler: YES) (1/7)

There's been a lot of excitement about pluralistic value alignment 🌈 — AI that reflects the full range of human perspectives But no formal way to benchmark whether we're actually making progress. 🤔 Introducing 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐓𝐎𝐍𝐁𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐇. 🎉Accepted to #ICLR2026 1/n 🧵

Do LLMs Benefit from Their Own Words?🤔 In multi-turn chats, models are typically given their own past responses as context. But do their own words always help… Or are they more often a waste of compute and a distraction? 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2602.24287

Models are now expert math solvers, and so AI for math education is receiving increasing attention. Our new preprint evaluates 11 VLMs on our QA benchmark, DrawEduMath. We highlight a startling gap: models perform less well on inputs from K-12 students who need more help. 🧵

Yesterday was my last day at MSR. We recently learned that our roles were eliminated, and with them our little FATE Montreal team. I joined MSR a bit over 7.5 years ago while on active chemotherapy, and being at MSR has overlapped with so much change in my life.

Our paper, "What's in My Human Feedback", received an oral presentation at ICLR! Our method automatically+interpretably identifies preferences in human feedback data; we use this to improve personalization + safety. Reach out if you have data/use cases to apply this to! arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26202

Finally we do test it empirically: finding some models where the embedding matrix of the LLM already provides decently interpretable nearest neighbors But this was not the full story yet... @mariusmosbach.bsky.social and @elinorpd.bsky.social nudged me to use contextual embeddings

Really cool new work with surprising results! Highly recommend checking out the demo 👀

Grok fact-checks our paper on Grok fact-checking - and it approves!

🎭 How do LLMs (mis)represent culture? 🧮 How often? 🧠 Misrepresentations = missing knowledge? spoiler: NO! At #CHI2026 we are bringing ✨TALES✨ a participatory evaluation of cultural (mis)reps & knowledge in multilingual LLM-stories for India 📜 arxiv.org/abs/2511.21322 1/10

this is amazing! made quick NYC & boston posters

Potato is a great platform for researchers! Highly recommend (plus a great development team behind it)

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

What should academics be doing right now? I have been writing up some thoughts on what the research says about effective action, and what universities specifically can do. davidbau.github.io/poetsandnurs... It's on GitHub. Suggestions and pull requests welcome. github.com/davidbau/poe...

I'll be presenting this work on January 25th (Hall 2, poster 41) at #AAAI2026 in Singapore! Please stop by and reach out if you'd like to chat 😁

🎉 Excited to share our new paper which was accepted to #AAAI2026! As LLMs become increasingly used as sources of factual knowledge, we ask: Do they perform equitably across users of different backgrounds? 🧵⬇️ 1/6

Most LLM evals use API calls or offline inference, testing models in a memory-less silo. Our new Patterns paper shows this misses how LLMs actually behave in real user interfaces, where personalization and interaction history shape responses: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19364

Elinor Poole-Dayan, Jiayi Wu, Taylor Sorensen, Jiaxin Pei, Michiel A. Bakker: Benchmarking Overton Pluralism in LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01351 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01351 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.01351

Thoughtful (as always) blog post from Nicholas Carlini. "Are large language models worth it?" A nice read giving his perspective on risks of ML models. Post: nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2025... For people who prefer, this is the video of the talk from @colmweb.org www.youtube.com/watch?v=PngH...

Extremely thrilled to talk about our new paper: "Who Evaluates AI’s Social Impacts? Mapping Coverage And Gaps In First And Third Party Evaluations". This is the first big project output from the @eval-eval.bsky.social coalition! Thread below:

Congratulations @sivareddyg.bsky.social ! 🥳 Incredibly well deserved!!

We're excited to announce that the website and registration for IC2S2 2026 (July 28-31) will launch in early December! The Vermont Complex Systems Institute @vcsi.bsky.social at the University of Vermont will be hosting IC2S2 in 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=p412S4GnPkc&feature=youtu.be

It's the season for PhD apps!! 🥧 🦃 ☃️ ❄️ Apply to Wisconsin CS to research - Societal impact of AI - NLP ←→ CSS and cultural analytics - Computational sociolinguistics - Human-AI interaction - Culturally competent and inclusive NLP with me! lucy3.github.io/prospective-...

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

🧵Excited to present our work at #EMNLP2025 “Analyzing Dialectal Biases in LLMs for Knowledge and Reasoning Benchmarks”! Paper 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2510.00962 w/ Eileen Pan, Skyler Seto, @allisonkoe.bsky.social @maartjeterhoeve.bsky.social

it's crazy how typos are impossible to catch until *after* you submit a paper, after which they become glaringly noticeable

Which, whose, and how much knowledge do LLMs represent? I'm excited to share our preprint answering these questions: "Epistemic Diversity and Knowledge Collapse in Large Language Models" 📄Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04226 💻Code: github.com/dwright37/ll... 1/10

What makes dialogue 💬 constructive 🫂? We address this question in our #EMNLP2025 paper investigating how **responsivity** can characterize conversation quality ✨ Brandon Roy will be presenting our work (Oral) on Nov 7, Room A109 at 10:30. 🧵👇 ​​https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1798/

Great piece by @natolambert.bsky.social on the current state of human exhaustion in the AI world. Makes this important point:

👀 www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

This paper underscores how “misinformation” is not easily operationalized as single pieces of factually untrue content, but often takes shape through the motivated amplification of specific evidence (often true evidence) that serves to build and reinforce misleading frames.