Last word: History of science exists. Philosophy of science exists. Science and technology studies exist. There is no excuse for writing about science in complete and utter oblivion about vast scholarship that has produced a lot of knowledge and understanding about what science is and how it works.

Princeton has shared the full talk I had with @katemanne.bsky.social mediacentral.princeton.edu/category/2_C...?

🚀Introducing 𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐃𝐄-𝐋𝐋𝐌: A reporting checklist for using LLMs in behavioral & social science ✅GUIDE-LLM is a reporting checklist designed by 80+ experts to improve transparency, reproducibility & ethical accountability of LLM-based research 📄 llm-checklist.com

This. Bad science is still science. Morally bankrupt science is still science. Science is not inherently good, but a process. The sooner we all accept this, the sooner we can fight against the current movements as the scientifically flawed and morally appalling things that they are.

Totally. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I do just this in a recent paper critiquing LLMs as human subjects in psych research. "we suggest that the appeal of [LLMs] reveals something important about present anxieties within cognitive science and how they might be resolved."

No, “AI” is not a Stochastic Parrot 🦜 @mmitchell.bsky.social writing on how people dramatically misunderstand the "stochastic parrot" critique. medium.com/@margarmitch...

Not infrequently, something I post is subjected to hostile quote tweets (or screencaps) leading to a wave of AI boosters discussing me/my work, or rather pretending to, since it never actually reflects understanding of what I do. A short 🧵>>

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

Excellent! More precision please 👏👏👏

This is so so upsetting. So Grammerly is violating the memory of bell hooks AND making AI versions of the rest of us before we're even dead. Someone tell me who to sue, not even joking.

“Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.”

I'm suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent. State law requires consent before someone's name can be used for commercial purposes. www.wired.com/story/gramma...

Good words of warning here. AI models are generally designed to read and incorporate (and, in a sense, believe) virtually everything they find online, with very few guardrails. The information can get divorced from its original source, context, & rebuttals or retractions. That's a really big problem

I try to teach my kids this all the time. In order to become good at something, you have to be willing to be bad at it first. I worry that our kids will forget the messy process of learning things. AI promises "woah, I know kung fu," but minds and bodies don't work that way.

"The Trump administration is engaged in a brazen and far-reaching campaign of censorship while cynically and falsely claiming that censorship is what it is fighting." CITR v. Rubio, new case just filed in DDC by @knightcolumbia.org & @protectdemocracy.org. knightcolumbia.org/content/tech...

This is true, and a key thing to reflect on: one can be agnostic about tech in the abstract, but this tech *doesn't exist in the abstract*. It only exists concretely, and do you imagine you'll have more control over its concrete expression than the wealthiest people in the world? If so, how so?

A few things I've learnt from writing >4,000 word pieces: - They tend to be more popular than my short pieces! - They're more definitive - like reference material, not a hot take. - Not everyone will reach the end, and that's okay. - Write so that the people who do find it incredibly satisfying.

this is a very good thread. the point of rough drafts is that by creating them, you *learn about the nature of the problem you are trying to solve* and your new understanding shapes your strategy

Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Made it to Friday but at what cost

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

New paper from team @aial.ie! aial.ie/research/gpa... EU's AI Act Article 53(1)(d) is an obligation for GPAI model providers to publicly provide a 'summary' on their model’s training data. The team assessed published summaries along 6 dimensions & found that all big providers failed on all 6. 1/

Thread

I can’t believe the “cheat-on-everything” guy would do this.

On NJ Transit on the way home and the train just died. Just another day/reminder of how “the richest and most powerful nation in the world” cannot do mass transit. We can afford a war and build concentration camps, but not mass transit.

In writing about AI Surrogates for human subjects research, @mjcrockett.bsky.social and i realized that their appeal indexes disciplinary anxieties. Dave's post nicely details some of the broader (institutional) anxieties that promises of AI replacements are surfacing. bsky.app/profile/lmes...

Good morning! Yes, this is he

I gave a short talk at Cornell yesterday on my science-of-science work investigating how AI is being used by researchers and how we should go about crafting policies in response. Blanket policies are hard, privacy is important, we need more measurement. Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1gNTK...

In the midst of the geopolitical horror, I've been doing some processing around the most recent wave of Epstein files. While there's been no single presidency-destroying bombshell (could Trump even be destroyed that way?), there's a pattern of impunity and willful ignorance that's hard to accept.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

a good thing is when someone posts a picture of a cat, and then people reply with "great cat, here also is a picture of my cat." unsolicited cat pics aplenty. this could be the world we build

This is such an important point. Tech often treats knowledge as a kind of retrieval system for facts, like you just order them from a menu A librarian is like a chef who can say what ingredients do you have, what flavors do you like? And then introduce you to the best food you've never heard of

i.... can't.

One of my favourite sides of politics/media.

Wise piece.

Tomorrow!

Back in the 1980s-2000s, there was an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that worked to oppose irresponsible and dangerous uses of computers in warfare. Maybe it needs a reboot, in our new age of AI. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute...

Today's edition of "collapsing boundary between human and machine" substack.com/home/post/p-... (see thread below for an analysis of how this helps the AI industry)

Great thread! Epistemic vigilance mirrors the training of a professional historian. We are encouraged early on to read every document with a grain of salt. The historian is also comfortable with what we might call epistemic limitation: "We just don't know." This book exemplifies both.

As someone who has been teaching media literacy for over 20 years, this thread sums up a lot of my concerns about LLMs, especially as aggregators and search engines.

Riffing off this. I think a further risk with LLMs is that it de-socialises knowledge by circumventing human sources and training people to just ask a bot when they need info rather than another person. I don't think that is inevitable, but I think it is a real risk with long-term consequences.

This whole thread is a very important insight as to why getting information from an LLM, even if you are dutiful and vigilant, corrodes your ability to ascertain what is true or not ** LLMs do not provide the info you need in order to evaluate truth. **

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

I wrote a book! (Yes, this often happens to me.) And yes, it's the pink stripe in the rainbow flag when you stack them right. It's out Tuesday and I start doing events on Monday with the most amazing people. List here and more below: www.rebeccasolnit.net/events1.html

Hi there social psychologists- excited to pop in on SPSP for a workshop in the use of AI in social science tomorrow morning with @mjcrockett.bsky.social @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social & Alexis Palmer. Ping me if you want to say hi!

This is also a crucial point, and I think it connects to the problems of scale and the goal of the universal expert the promise of LLMs is that they can be used in any role, to be expert at anything, to support any perspective this is not only untrue, it is literally incoherent

Without considering the sources of claims, efforts at epistemic vigilance become play-acting. With LLMs, we don't know the sources. Excellent thread from @mjcrockett.bsky.social

I had sent MJ this essay. we were both reading it and finding it 🔥 but nearly at the same time realized it was largely LLM penned. If folks want to spend time conversing with an LLM, fine. But i'm frustrated by how much time i spend reading slop (w/out knowing it). Disclose use of LLM from the jump!

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...