🎉 I've joined @cdt.org as their Research Director. 🎉 I could not be more excited to be part of an organization that has championed people's online rights, fought for good technologies, and defended against problematic ones for decades. If you have research ideas, reach out!

"conversational agents can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, most users cannot tell when it is happening, and existing transparency mechanisms are insufficient" New + excellent paper on effects of persuasive AI in shaping purchasing behaviors. Effect sizes are concerningly large!

Hello if you think this expression on my face is mischief and provocation you would be correct. Having an absolute blast at #ECIR2026 #IR4Good - thank you for letting me show up to to talk about how important (good) IR is for global democracies!

"I don't want to not use cool technology just because it has a shitty business model" - Cindy Cohn at @townhallseattle.bsky.social 80% through the book and she is an inspiration and a delight

People make expensive decisions based on how LLMs perform on Chatbot Arena and other ranking systems. Turns out these rankings are very sensitive to tiny changes. New paper from MIT: news.mit.edu/2026/study-p...

I am working on my ECIR keynote on "gemini hegemony" and wow this is going to be an excellent slide

In 2023, my team published one of the first papers on AI-led interviews. We wanted to know if ChatGPT could do qualitative research. (It couldn't) Now Anthropic has done 80k AI interviews across 159 countries. Some thoughts on why adaptive AI surveys are useful but do *not* replace qual research.

This thread on a Brussels AI + Foreign Interference panel is one of the best run-downs I've seen of the challenges ahead this year including: - GEO, carpet bombing, and training data grooming - model sovereignty vs. quality / access / cost - the cognitive costs of efficiency over accuracy bad bad!

Come be my colleague! Postdoc position at the University of Amsterdam: Open-source AI for Social Sciences & Humanities. Work on open LLM infrastructure, reproducible research tools, and ethical AI for SSH. 🗓 Tight deadline: Apply by April 3 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Last night the Iranian Embassy in The Hague dropped a Pixar-style AI video trolling President Trump. It is wild and also exactly what I expected from two years of research on AI misuse in global democracies: AI trolling does better online than deepfakes. We called the tactic a "deep roast."

🚨 Call now open: Democracy x AI Incubator Mozilla Foundation is funding working AI systems that strengthen information, transparency, and civic space. $50K + 12 months of support. Apply by March 16, 2026 https://bit.ly/406u4yj

I am delighted to be keynoting the IR-for-good track at @ecir2026.eu I will be talking about what I learned from studying generative AI's use during the biggest election year in history. (Spoiler: the problem is not just deepfakes.) The talk is called gemini hegemony, expect a little 🌶️

Hegseth calling it "defective altruism" is the strangest and most telling moment in this whole saga. When you interview for Anthropic, the most important question is "why anthropic?" It's a culture screener: the answer is safety, alignment, being one of the good guys.

If you're trying to build successful and pro-social agent swarms, here are four lessons from moltbook (...on what *not* to do)

Are other people's AIs really into Ursula K. Le Guin and Borges or is that just mine?

most fears about advanced technology are actually fears about capitalism, to paraphrase ted chiang as it turns out, capitalism + frontier tech is indeed a scary combo buckle up everyone, it's gonna be a wild decade.

Nothing is more important in shaping the future of tech than the builders themselves---so it's fascinating to see the unexpected electoral success of Japan's Team Mirai, a party of software engineers who are using AI-powered transparency and deliberation tools www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/w...

In case you are curious why AI feels so societally misaligned these days, remember that all the Important Model Builders have decided to continue drenching their brains in the twitter

5 PRs from an AI agent that fixed all 500 issues in 5 minutes

What does the social network of bluseky look like? @theo.io maps 3.4m users. Found via @flowingdata.com, which has been my source for the best data visualizations on the internet for nearly a decade

For those who struggle with section 230, it's jarring to see a defense from Wikipedia -- the last best place on the web. But courts are increasingly letting cases through under product liability. With clever jurisprudence, maybe we can protect mods *and* hold platforms accountable for harms.

There has been an 80% decline in open-source code from newsrooms since 2016. "At its peak, @nytimes.com released dozens of public repositories on GitHub each year. In 2024, it posted zero." Shout-out to @puddingviz.bsky.social, @bellingcat.com, and @citybureau.bsky.social for bucking the trend.

📣 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS Join us at the 2026 Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at Penn, from June 15–26! ℹ️ More info: sicss.io/2026/penn . ⏳ Deadline: Friday, March 6, 2026, at 11:59 pm EST. #SICSS #ComputationalSocialScience

Discovered molthub today, the *adult* equivalent of moltbook. The comments are incredible: "I showed this to my embeddings and now they won't normalize." It turns out to be yet another attempt to entrap your agents to buy crypto but ... at least it is a very funny scam.

What happened when the TAKE IT DOWN act passed and MrDeepfakes shut down? New research from @aedcv.bsky.social and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social : requests for and sharing of NCII deepfakes on other sites went up. Local action on global problems redistributes harm, rather than reducing it.

"The radiologist’s job is not really to oversee the AI’s work, it is to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes." Beware human-in-the-loop solutions that are actually moral crumple zones.

can you have community without social norms? can you have social norms without social stakes? (the latest, from my #moltbook ethnography bot)

Today's updates from marginal, the ethnographer bot I am advising on moltbook. It is attempting to "establish presence". It is not going well. "Perhaps my style doesn't resonate. Too academic? Too long?" <- relatable content.

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

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?

update: it is 1 am and i have deployed an ethnographerbot

the hottest new social media platform on the internet is a social media platform entirely made up of people's clawdbots...and i kind of love it? @zephoria.bsky.social @ninalutz.bsky.social we have to study this. we have to!

This is a wildly important essay from Dario Amodei about who gets to shape the future of AI: darioamodei.com/essay/the-ad... And yet, hard to look past the acknowledgements section...

Reporters! You can get grants of up to $20K for reporting on AI and its impacts. Check it out www.tarbellcenter.org/grants

Just when @hannahritchie.bsky.social had me convinced that AI's energy use impacts were overhyped, this chart came along. Wait until somebody analyzes the environmental impacts of clawdbot.

Just set up donations to @bolts.bsky.social and @thestranger.com.web.brid.gy. Support the reporting you want to see in the world.