"Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind." >>

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah "Let me use Copilot for Notepad". "I'm going to sign into my account for Notepad". What the fuck are you talking about. It's Notepad.

Our new paper in #PNAS (bit.ly/4fcWfma) presents a surprising finding—when words change meaning, older speakers rapidly adopt the new usage; inter-generational differences are often minor. w/ Michelle Yang, ‪@sivareddyg.bsky.social‬ , @msonderegger.bsky.social‬ and @dallascard.bsky.social‬👇(1/12)

Thrilled to announce our new survey that explores the exciting possibilities and troubling risks of computational persuasion in the era of LLMs 🤖💬 📄Arxiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07775 💻 GitHub: github.com/beyzabozdag/...

Started a new podcast with @tomvergara.bsky.social ! Behind the Research of AI: We look behind the scenes, beyond the polished papers 🧐🧪 If this sounds fun, check out our first "official" episode with the awesome Gauthier Gidel from @mila-quebec.bsky.social : open.spotify.com/episode/7oTc...

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, declared victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary after Andrew Cuomo conceded the race. “Tonight we made history,” Mamdani said, addressing his supporters. wapo.st/44yMVoI

Mahmoud Khalil is finally home with his beautiful wife and newborn son. Each one of the 104 days he spent detained was a grave injustice. From the moment of his detention, @ccrjustice.org + @aclu.org engaged my office as we worked closely to help secure his release. They did remarkable work here.

The facts: We release (MVPBench) with around 55K videos (grouped as *minimal video pairs*) from diverse physical understanding sources Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2506.09987 Huggingface: huggingface.co/datasets/fac... GitHub: github.com/facebookrese... Leaderboard: huggingface.co/spaces/faceb...

Excited to share the results of my recent internship! We ask 🤔 What subtle shortcuts are VideoLLMs taking on spatio-temporal questions? And how can we instead curate shortcut-robust examples at a large-scale? We release: MVPBench Details 👇🔬

Today, I was denied access to seeing my constituent, Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If there is nothing to hide, cut the crap. Let his lawyer and I check on him.

Breaking news: The Trump administration revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, saying it allowed anti-American agitators. Existing foreign students must transfer or risk losing their legal status, DHS said.

when in albuquerque…

We won a Senior Area Chair Award at NAACL!! Many thanks again to my amazing coauthors Gaurav Kamath and @sivareddyg.bsky.social :-)

Check out Gaurav's video on their #NAACL paper and find @adadtur.bsky.social at the conference 👇

Great work from labmates on LLMs vs humans regarding linguistic preferences: You know when a sentence kind of feels off e.g. "I met at the park the man". So in what ways do LLMs follow these human intuitions?

Ada is an undergrad and will soon be looking for PhDs. Gaurav is a PhD student looking for intellectually stimulating internships/visiting positions. They did most of the work without much of my help. Highly recommend them. Please reach out to them if you have any positions.

Incredibly proud of my students @adadtur.bsky.social and Gaurav Kamath for winning a SAC award at #NAACL2025 for their work on assessing how LLMs model constituent shifts.

Congratulations to Mila members @adadtur.bsky.social , Gaurav Kamath and @sivareddyg.bsky.social for their SAC award at NAACL! Check out Ada's talk in Session I: Oral/Poster 6. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.05670

I filmed this yesterday on my way to Lousiana where my constituent Rümeysa Öztürk is being wrongfully held by ICE. I’m there now demanding her release. More to come.

Models like DeepSeek-R1 🐋 mark a fundamental shift in how LLMs approach complex problems. In our preprint on R1 Thoughtology, we study R1’s reasoning chains across a variety of tasks; investigating its capabilities, limitations, and behaviour. 🔗: mcgill-nlp.github.io/thoughtology/

Not sure if this has been shared here yet, but this is video of Rumeysa Ozturk's arrest posted by WCVB. It's terrifying.

I would like to nominate Maxwell Smart for national security advisor.

this is outrageously terrible but if there's one thing the Trump administration’s policy is doing so far it is expediting public outrage and turning the masses against everything AI www.wired.com/story/ai-saf...

Instruction-following retrievers can efficiently and accurately search for harmful and sensitive information on the internet! 🌐💣 Retrievers need to be aligned too! 🚨🚨🚨 Work done with the wonderful Nick and @sivareddyg.bsky.social 🔗 mcgill-nlp.github.io/malicious-ir/ Thread: 🧵👇

Super excited that this is finally out! We evaluated leading LLM-based web agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, on our new benchmark SafeArena and found that many are surprisingly compliant with malicious requests. Check out the leaderboard here: huggingface.co/spaces/McGil...

Web agents powered by LLMs can solve complex tasks, but our analysis shows that they can also be easily misused to automate harmful tasks. See the thread below for more details on our new web agent safety benchmark: SafeArena and Agent Risk Assessment framework (ARIA).

The potential for malicious misuse of LLM agents is a serious threat. That's why we created SafeArena, a safety benchmark for web agents. See the thread and our paper for details: arxiv.org/abs/2503.04957 👇

Llamas browsing the web look cute, but they are capable of causing a lot of harm! Check out our new Web Agents ∩ Safety benchmark: SafeArena! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.04957

With ARIA, we find that Claude is substantially safer than Qwen, which very rarely refuses user requests, indicating limited safeguards for web-oriented tasks.

The harmfulness of LLMs varies: whereas Claude-3.5 Sonnet refuses a majority of harmful tasks, Qwen-2-VL completes over a quarter of the 250 harmful tasks we designed for this benchmark. Moreover, a GPT-4o agent completes an alarming number of unsafe requests, despite extensive safety training.

Agents like OpenAI Operator can solve complex computer tasks, but what happens when users use them to cause harm, e.g. spread misinformation? To find out, we introduce SafeArena (safearena.github.io), a benchmark to assess the capabilities of web agents to complete harmful web tasks. A thread 👇

New — I wrote about how the Congressional Dems who voted to censure Rep. Al Green don’t understand their enemy and aren’t made for this moment:

Can a Large Language Model (LLM) with zero Pokémon-specific training achieve expert-level performance in competitive Pokémon battles? Introducing PokéChamp, our minimax LLM agent that reaches top 30%-10% human-level Elo on Pokémon Showdown! New paper on arXiv and code on github!

My new paper "Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different": arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113. Generalization behaviours in deep learning can be intuitively understood through a notion of soft inductive biases, and formally characterized with countable hypothesis bounds! 1/12

What if we didn't design AI to behave as impersonators? #AIEthics. The bots encouraged users' dangerous beliefs. "If given by a human therapist, he added, those answers could have resulted in the loss of a license to practice, or civil or criminal liability." www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/h...

📢New Paper Alert!🚀 Human alignment balances social expectations, economic incentives, and legal frameworks. What if LLM alignment worked the same way?🤔 Our latest work explores how social, economic, and contractual alignment can address incomplete contracts in LLM alignment🧵

A reminder for these times.

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F. 18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it. We made this website to tell our story: 18f.org

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14678 Data: tinyurl.com/chase-data Code: github.com/McGill-NLP/C...

Presenting ✨ 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐄: 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 ✨ Work w/ fantastic advisors Dima Bahdanau and @sivareddyg.bsky.social Thread 🧵:

New preprint! Metaphors shape how people understand politics, but measuring them (& their real-world effects) is hard. We develop a new method to measure metaphor & use it to study dehumanizing metaphor in 400K immigration tweets Link: bit.ly/4i3PGm3 #NLP #NLProc #polisky #polcom #compsocialsci 🐦🐦

✨New paper✨ Linguistic evaluations of LLMs often implicitly assume that language is generated by symbolic rules. In a new position paper, @adelegoldberg.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I argue that languages are not Lego sets, and evaluations should reflect this! arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13195

Math is hard

Super excited to finally announce our NAACL 2025 main conference paper “Language Models Largely Exhibit Human-like Constituent Ordering Preferences”! We examine constituent ordering preferences between humans and LLMs; we present two main findings… 🧵

Interested in knowing more about LLMs agents and in contributing to this topic?🚀 📢We're thrilled to announce REALM: The first Workshop for Research on Agent Language Models 🤖 #ACL2025NLP in Vienna 🎻 We have an exciting lineup of speakers 🗓️ Submit your work by *March 1st* @aclmeeting.bsky.social

When asked to draw a scientist, school-age kids in the United States are increasingly sketching women, according to a study from 2018. Read more on #WomenInScienceDay: https://scim.ag/4hOUuvx

they are mostly targeting black employees so this is quite literally just a repeat of woodrow wilson’s segregationist purge of the federal government

Palantir's platforms like Foundry are at their core, surveillance technologies. Cohere's partnership with Palantir is dangerous and should not be normalized.