Many think LLM-simulated participants can transform behavioral science. But there's been a lack of accessible discussion of what it means to validate LLMs for behavioral scientists. Under what conditions can we trust LLMs to learn about human parameters? Our paper maps the validation landscape. 1/

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

It's out!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with Andy Guess (Politics/SPIA), Brandon Stewart (Sociology), and me (CS). puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... Please apply before Sunday, the 13th of December!

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

Preprint alert! 🥳 How are social bias and CSS interconnected? 🤔 @aytalina.bsky.social, @janabernhard.bsky.social, @valeriehase.bsky.social, and I argue that social bias shapes CSS as a field and as a methodology. Progress in CSS depends on engaging with both dimensions! osf.io/preprints/so...

🌍 Are you new to @icwsm.bsky.social or JQD:DM and based in a low- or middle-income country? 💡 Submit a project idea, get matched with a mentor, present virtually at ICWSM'26, and prepare a submission for Sept 2026! 📢 Call icwsm.org/2026/submit.... 🚀 Apply by Jan 15 forms.gle/A9GkJboP7qi3...

🚨 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2026. If you're interested in AI, HCI, and designing better online platforms and experiences, apply to work with me! More info: piccardi.me

📢 New insights on #GenAI interviewing agents asking sensitive open questions compared to a text-based web survey. Answers to male agent include more topics, but no evidence of social desirability. 👉 New #OpenAccess paper with @jkhoehne.bsky.social #cneuert in #IJMR. 🌐 doi.org/10.1177/1470...

⏳ Only 5 days left to apply! Please note the updated application link (due to a recent university webpage update): 👉 PhD Candidate in Emotionally and Socially Aware Natural Language Processing careers.universiteitleiden.nl/job/PhD-Cand...

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-...

Join our CSS department @gesis.org! Postdoc/senior researcher position, tenure track! All info at: www.gesis.org/institut/kar...

Maybe it is time to report *intra*-annotator agreement? aclanthology.org/2025.nlpersp...

Misinformation research has a causality problem: lab experiments are limited; observational studies confounded. We used causal inference on 9.9M tweets, quantifying effects in the wild while blocking backdoor paths. Does misinfo get higher engagement? Are following discussions more emotional? 🧵

🚨I'm recruiting a fully funded EPSRC PhD student (start 2026/27) to work with me and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar on multilingual misinformation and online harms in #NLP. (the position is open to UK and international students.) Details and contact information 👇: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

🚨 Content alert 🚨 New recording and workshop materials published! ➡️ Large Language Models for Social Research: Potentials and Challenges 👤 @indiiigo.bsky.social (University of Mannheim) 📺 youtu.be/p5wPJHK-74M 🗒️ github.com/SocialScienc...

as a reviewer, it should be acceptable to chase ACs and remind them to write their meta reviews already because I want to know which reviewer they're siding with godamnit....

👋🏼 I'm at #EMNLP2025 presenting "The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for LLMs" 🕑 Thu. Nov 6, 12:30 - 13:30 📍 Findings Session 2, Hall C3

New opinion paper out with Esther Ploeger (Aalborg University): We Need to Measure Data Diversity in NLP — Better and Broader at #EMNLP2025 (main) aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...

Honored to be invited! Looking forward to the conference to learn about new directions in complex networks research and to share my work on Network Inequality and Network Fairness. See you in Zaragoza!

Social simulations with LLMs can have many interesting applications, but LLMs suffer from biases, e.g., stereotypical representations of the groups being simulated. In our paper led by @marlutz.bsky.social, we show that some of these biases can be mitigated via the structure of persona prompts! 🧵⬇️

There’s plenty of evidence for political bias in LLMs, but very few evals reflect realistic LLM use cases — which is where bias actually matters. IssueBench, our attempt to fix this, is accepted at TACL, and I will be at #EMNLP2025 next week to talk about it! New results 🧵

*JOB* As part of the @assured.bsky.social project, we are searching for a person to work in our Secure Data Center team at @gesis.org to create safe researcher trainings. www.gesis.org/en/institute... The position is open until filled, so do not hesitate to reach our directly if you are interested!

Thrilled to talk about how seemingly small decisions in silicon sampling can have a large impact on simulated survey responses 👀 Join us on Oct 29th! 👈

Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Join us as postdoc at the Inequality Discourse Observatory at the University of Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/7... We will do epic research between Linguistics and Computational Social Science at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

Come join next Wednesday if you want to rant about society's love-hate relationship with LLMs!

🚨 Are you looking for a PhD in #NLProc dealing with #LLMs? 🎉 Good news: I am hiring! 🎉 The position is part of the “Contested Climate Futures" project. 🌱🌍 You will focus on developing next-generation AI methods🤖 to analyze climate-related concepts in content—including texts, images, and videos.

We are hiring multiple PhD and postdocs for two newly funded projects at the intersection of mental health and political polarization at the CS Dept at Aalto, Finland. The PIs are Juhi Kulshrestha, Talayeh Aledavood, and Mikko Kivelä. Full call text and link to apply: www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

How can an imitative model like an LLM outperform the experts it is trained on? Our new COLM paper outlines three types of transcendence and shows that each one relies on a different aspect of data diversity. arxiv.org/abs/2508.17669

Come join and organise the workshop with us!

If you want to nominate yourself to be the organizer of the next Argument Mining workshop @argminingorg.bsky.social‬, fill in this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Deadline: Aug 22nd 13.00 CEST!

New publication, out in Political Analysis: There is an increasing array of tools to measure facets of morality in political language. But while they ostensibly measure the same concept, do they actually? I and @fhopp.bsky.social set out to see what happens.

The Call for #EMNLP2025 @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social student volunteers is out: 2025.emnlp.org/calls/volunt... Please fill out the form by 20 Sep 2026 : forms.gle/qfTkVGyDitXi... For questions, you can contact emnlp2025-student-volunteer-chairs [at] googlegroups [dot] com

Work with @giadapistilli.com and @yjernite.bsky.social 📄 Full Paper: huggingface.co/datasets/AI-... 🔍 Explore INTIMA: huggingface.co/datasets/AI-...

Wondering what makes each of us unique and how AI should handle human diversity? 🤔 We're organizing Identity-Aware AI workshop at #ECAI2025 Bologna on Oct 25. Deadline: Aug 22 Website: identity-aware-ai.github.io

Wikipedia has long been one of my favourite places online. As AI becomes part of knowledge creation, there's a lot we can learn from its editor communities. I spoke with Daniel Wu about AI content on Wikipedia; some thoughts made it into this piece: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

What do people in 🇨🇭🇩🇪🇯🇵🇺🇸 think about GenAI for news-related purposes? We find the adoption of GenAI for news and trust in the journalistic deployment of GenAI are relatively low, and so is knowledge regarding GenAI. Read more in this new paper led by Eliza Mitova! journalqd.org/article/view...

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following. It still became a polarization machine. Then we tried six interventions to fix social media. The results were… not what we expected. arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white" www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/a...

Time for our second keynote 🚨 @fvancesco.bsky.social is going to guide us through practical aspects of safety that are often overlooked in academia. Do we want to close the gap between academia and industry? Join us to find out! #ACL2025NLP

Last day of #ACL2025NLP but there's still lots to do: attend the #WikiNLP workshop, where we explore how NLP and wikipedia can help each other! We have amazing keynotes, discussions with Wikipedia editors, a panel + posters! Details: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NLP_for... Join us in room 2.31!

Hire Agostina! She does lots of great work in CSS+NLP

It’s poster board 1! The only CSS poster in this poster session!!

👋 #ACL2025NLP 🇦🇹 @marlutz.bsky.social and I are presenting our poster on demographic representativeness of LLMs today! 🕦 10:30-12:00 📍 Hall X5 (board 1 or 14 according to different sources 🧐) Here’s the paper on ACL anthology: aclanthology.org/2025.finding... Drop by!

Very excited about all these papers on sociotechnical alignment & the societal impacts of AI at #ACL2025. As is now tradition, I made some timetables to help me find my way around. Sharing here in case others find them useful too :) 🧵

I'm at #ACL2025NLP this week in Vienna, and organizing a BoF session on Teaching NLP with Margot Mieskes! This is an informal session to bring together attendees interested in discussing current challenges and opportunities in teaching natural language processing.