Just back from vacation, and very hyped for today's Brazil vs. Japan game. As a Brazilian, one of the most endearing things is seeing other countries (esp. other developing ones) show affection for our team! We don't deserve you all! Below is the least I expect from today's game :-)

I swear that never, ever again, will I take a connecting flight through Frankfurt

New work from my lab! @teagrjohnson.bsky.social built a 12-dimensional narrative framework, annotated Dolma (no small feat given its extreme diversity), and analyzed narrative features across pretraining subsections. Highlight: pretraining data space displays strong narrative organization!

Hot take: "AI slop" is a bad term and blurs the debate on the value of AI-generated content. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/ai-slop-isnt

Please join our interview study 🙏

New preprint! We introduce a new benchmark, SciConBench, with 9.11k scientific questions derived from Cochrane Systematic Reviews. We find evidence that frontier AI agents **cannot** synthesize scientific conclusions well. A thread 🧵 w/ @hayoungjung.bsky.social & others!

Quite a list of authors. See also Diyi Yang, @mariaa.bsky.social , M Sagalnik, @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social , &c

📝Excited to share our new preprint, “AI Assistance for Discretionary Work: Increasing Feedback Provision in Higher Education”: arxiv.org/abs/2606.03095 A thread 🧵 1/8

🚨New preprint!🚨 arxiv.org/abs/2606.03095 In a randomized field experiment in a 300-level machine learning course, teaching assistants received AI-assisted feedback drafts after grading student submissions. Did AI help them provide more feedback when feedback was optional? A thread 🧵

“a town supervisor on Long Island had to debunk a rumor about a new data-center project after an inaccurate AI-generated search summary attracted so much attention that residents planned a protest (which they promoted with a flyer that itself appeared to be AI-generated).” @kait.bsky.social

In a new blog post, I reminisce about the Web I grew up in and argue that AI is only the latest blow to an already dying notion of "the Web." I argue that we shouldn't be overly reactionary because much of what AI threatens isn't worth saving. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-slow-u...

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

Three things said about AI and social science: it's a topic to study, a thing to critique, a tool to use. My new Daedalus essay argues these aren't three conversations; they're one. A 🧵 on "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool." www.amacad.org/publication/...

In a new blog post, I argue that the anti-ai movement ought to distinguish between claims about the technology and the "project of AI," as defined by Vetsi et al. in their new paper. 🔗: doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-anti-a...

My new post discusses the probable future of AI-assisted shopping! Drawing on our recent paper, I argue that if LLMs become the interface through which we search, compare, and buy things, we need a much sharper line between advertising and advice! doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/when-the-a...

In a post-CHI blog post, I talk about what I believe technology like the Anthropic Interviewer will mean for qualitative research. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/qualitativ...

What if you could have more agency over your social media feed? CITP researchers have built Bonsai to explore what happens when users can have that control. Try the app now on @bsky.app! getbonsai.org Team: @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social @andresmh.com @mariannealq.bsky.social Omar El Malki

Come check bonsai out Thursday at P114!!! 9am session 😴😪🎉

I'm flying to Barcelona to attend @chi.acm.org! Let's hang out! :-)

Like Grok and Attie, more and more social media platforms now integrate AI directly in online conversations. But how do these AI bots actually impact political discourse? We ran a series of experiments to find out. (Spoiler: the news are not altogether great.) osf.io/preprints/so...

Important thread and paper. This is one of my biggest worries about chatbots, especially when combined with roleplay and any kind of user-chatbot "relationship." And now imagine persuasion for politics and other topics, not just purchasing choices...

LLMs will transform e-commerce in ways that consumer protection is unprepared for! Our new preprint finds that conversational AI can strongly steer consumer choices: sponsored product selection nearly tripled relative to traditional placement (N=2012). Link: arxiv.org/abs/2604.04263

Got a lovely shout-out in @devingaffney.com's phenomenal talk earlier. 😊 Always a joy to hear Devin speak; few people have their finger on the pulse of this ecosystem like he does. Probably my favourite talk of the conference so far.

What does it take to prove causality in tech harms cases? After rulings in NM & CA, commentators are throwing around causality in arguments both for & against the results. If you’re frustrated by the causality maze, don’t worry- @penney.bsky.social & I have you covered tsjournal.org/index.php/jo...

Pleased to share our new paper forthcoming in @icwsm.bsky.social! We introduce a novel framework to measure value expressions in social media posts at scale, leveraging personalization to handle the inherent subjectivity of human values. arxiv.org/abs/2511.08453

🚀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

Who produces hate speech? And how does that matter for content moderation? We show that across different countries and platforms, a relatively small share of users are responsible for a very large share of hate - overall, 5% write 83-100% of hateful content. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Thought-provoking thread by @mjcrockett.bsky.social Some additional thoughts: maybe the reason why math is where LLMs seem to be making most progress is that that's where verification is cheaper and more definitive (tuhs, sources matter less)? E.g., 17-year-olds proving conjectures...

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

This is such a banger

LLMs make statistical metascience easier. LLMs don't increase the validity of statistical metascience. www.argmin.net/p/devezers-urn

New paper! The Linear Representation Hypothesis is a powerful intuition for how language models work, but lacks formalization. We give a mathematical framework in which we can ask and answer a basic question: how many features can be stored under the hypothesis? 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2602.11246

I wrote about Brandon Sanderson’s take on AI art. It is one of the most thoughtful and intellectually humble pieces I've seen on the subject. TL;DR: I agree with the spirit, but not the conclusion. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/brandon-sa...

New research on Deepfake NCII: if I'm reading this correctly, legislation and site shutdowns are not enough to curb the behavior and demand for deepfaked pornography. It basically shifts those users to other spaces. h/t @tristanl.ee arxiv.org/abs/2602.02754

Deepfake pornography isn’t going away just because we are passing laws and taking down a couple of big websites. Our new pre-print, led by @aedcv.bsky.social suggests that the sharing of this material continued to prosper even after platform and policy shocks. arxiv.org/abs/2602.02754

Is the only way we can create algorithms that people understand to make them trivially simple? We argue, no. People can predict the behavior of algorithms that are arbitrarily complex, if and only if they are available, compact and aligned. arxiv.org/abs/2601.18966

CS ArXiv recently banned “review and position” papers, but what are those? Do they include more generated content? Who is most affected by this change? @yanai.bsky.social and I dug into the data to find out! Nearly 50% of Computers & Society papers might be censored, vs 3% of Computer Vision ‼️

Folks who have papers with emojis / images in the title! How do you make the pdf metadata title pretty?

In June 2024, X made its likes private. You can still like, authors can still see—but everyone else can’t. So… does hiding likes change what people are willing to endorse? Our new paper led by @yuweichuai.bsky.social: not very much! arxiv.org/abs/2601.11140

This new paper is very cool. But takeaway isn't "LLMs constantly leak books.' It’s "with the right (adversarial) procedure, you can extract memorized text." Prevalence in the wild is a separate question!! arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

I've often joked that as faculty I program in a high-level language called "graduate student". Having tried out Claude Code this morning, I (i) feel extremely at home, (ii) am realizing that research-by-graduate-student is perhaps the original vibe-coding. 1/2

Happy 2026! 🎉 📅 The ICWSM January submission deadline is just ten days away (Jan 15) Find all the information to submit your full paper, poster, demo, dataset, and tutorial proposal here: www.icwsm.org/2026/submit.... 🔔 Note that the deadline for workshop proposals is Jan 30!

Do reasoning models have real “Aha!” moments—mid-chain realizations where they intrinsically self-correct? In a new pre-print, “The Illusion of Insight in Reasoning Models," led by @liv-daliberti.bsky.social we provide strong evidence that they do not! 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2601.00514

If you've missed this piece about the different modes of empiricism in computer science versus the social sciences, I can highly recommend it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

ICYMI: Finally blogged about an "old" paper led by @groceryheist.cc that uses data from a @wikipedia.org system to show how the introduction of a biased AI flagging system can still lead to more fairness because the humans without the system are even more biased. mako.cc/copyrighteou...

Relevant thread with criticism/comments to the recent blog post

In a new blog post, I contrast two flavors of empiricism: the one practiced in the social sciences and the one practiced in ML/CS. I argue that we need both, given that CS is increasingly about "claims," and not just constructing artifacts. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

I like this summary of how CS became heavily empirical, especially the bit about the introduction of human concerns leading to beliefs that the only way to understand is empirical (this was the bane of my existence for a couple years, actually 🙂)

In a new blog post, I argue that CS is already an empirical discipline, even though we often act as if it is not (mostly to our students). doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...