I use Claude Code for all my research projects now, but it's built for programmers, not social scientists. Here's an ongoing log of learnings on how to use this hugely powerful tool for social science research. I'll update it weekly.

How to automate your Plaud AI notepin using N8N I have had my Plaud AI notepin for about three months now and I absolutely love it. I can record my thoughts or ideas with the press of a button. It makes taking notes on all sorts of things in my life totally frictionless. I'm going to be writing a…

Any academics out there who haven't played around with Claude code yet really gotta try it. I'd estimate recent past AI tools increased my research productivity by about 10-20%, Claude code feels like it will quickly reach 100-200%.

LLMs are exceptional programmers, but mediocre data scientists. In 2025, LLMs got terrifyingly good at software engineering. So why are they so unimpressive at data science? Data science doesn't really use tests that much LLMs are so powerful for software engineering is because of a 1-2 punch: As…

Get a Google sheet of your Oura data that updates every day Here's how you can automate pulling your latest Oura Ring data into a Google Sheet every day To do this we are going to use something that most people don't know about but is insanely powerful: Google Apps Script. Google Apps Script is a…

AI Could Fix School Examinations What if we fundamentally recreated exams from the ground up, with AI at the core? I see the potential to make a radically better way to do school exams. What's more, most of the technology already exists. Before we begin: I'm going to use the term "LLM" a lot. That…

Offsetting meat consumption is likely to be more effective than offsetting carbon emissions The consensus is that overall, carbon offsetting hasn't worked at reducing or negating emissions. Does that mean offsetting meat consumption is a dead-end? I argue no. If we look at the 2 main reasons why…

Is AI our secret weapon against factory farming? (podcast appearance) I was recently on "The Vegan Report" podcast talking about AI and the animal movement. We discuss AI tips, how advocates are using AI in their activism, fears and concerns people have over AI, and even AI consciousness!

Where will the next generation of world changers come from? AI can do much of the work that used to be reserved for interns and juniors. For cash-strapped, burnt-out workers in the NGO space, AI assistants are a tempting alternative to managing early career employees. But how can we reap these…

Be grateful for shit things Most people write gratitude journals about the good things in their life. I've done this, and while it feels good at first, it gets a bit repetitive. It cultivates a useful mindset, which is to just regularly be grateful for things in your life. However, I think we can…

Finding the number of AI tools overwhelming? Don't know where to go beyond ChatGPT? Lots of people feel the same. This post is for you. No jargon, no advanced things, no list of 100 tools. Just 5. I am extremely confident that one of them will be useful to you.

This summer I gave 3 talks on food security which are all now on YouTube! I've collected them in this post. Enjoy!

Here I make the case that AI art is real and valid art.

The impacts of AI on Animals: mine and other expert opinions

Are LLMs good at making charts and graphs? I distilled insights from several excellent data visualisation blogs.

I’m teaching a free 12 week-course on AI Myself and 3 other AI consultants are teaching a free 12-week practical course in generative AI. You'll go from beginner to confident user. It's open to anyone working on fixing our food system: promoting plant-forward diets, increasing animal welfare,…

How will AI developments affect the animal advocacy movement? I built a curated chatbot to find out, and you can use it too!

Looking at AI conversations on socials you get the feeling that excitement and anger are the only two valid emotions to feel about AI. In this very short post, I want to talk about fear.

The only AI concept that actually helps you use ChatGPT better "Do I need to learn about neural networks to understand ChatGPT?" I hear this all the time, and have been asked this a few times. I also see people making videos, courses and blog posts breaking down the technical details of how large…

"Will AI take jobs and should we protect jobs?" is the wrong framing for 2 reasons: - AI will automate *tasks* not whole jobs. All jobs will be impacted to some degree, but some way more than others - No one cares about jobs, they care about people (and maybe the economy). Protect people, not jobs.

New post from me! Combining 3 things I love: Latin dance, regressoin models, and my Oura Ring!

I tested the new ChatGPT agent on 11 use cases and it’s just ok ChatGPT agent has now come to people on the paid £20 a month plan. The shameless YouTube hype merchants are obviously impressed (must be hard having your mind BLOWN literally every few days...), others are disappointed, and others…

My new report with Good Growth and Faunalytics is out! Last year I completed a six month research contract with The Good Growth Co. They're a brilliant social science think tank that serves the animal advocacy movement and alternative protein sectors in East Asia. We analysed a ton of social media…

Concerns about AI’s energy use are reasonable I feel like every week I see the same debate play out again and again. "Is AI bad for the environment?" It a question on a lot of people's minds. I use AI for basically everything and so do many of my friends, so you can probably guess what my take is.…

New Blog post from me! I propose some pretty sci-fi ideas for how AI could create exciting new opportunities for qualitative researcher and their work.

The Deep Research Revolution: my talk at AI, Animals and Digital Minds London 2025 A few months ago I gave a talk at the AI, Animals and Digital Minds conference in London. It was on the exciting new possibilities that have been enabled by AI deep research tools (I've also written about them…

Why Scheduling meetings with ChatGPT can give you breakthrough ideas Some people schedule meetings in order to avoid thinking. They have a problem at work and they either don't want to or can't figure out themselves. By scheduling a meeting with a bunch of other people, they can hash through it…

My recent talk at VARC2025 is on YouTube! I got great feedback from on this one, including many people with no economics background. Give it a watch!

"I want to use AI to help with my presentations, but my IT team has a strict approved AI tools list, what can I do?" I've got this request a few times from security-minded orgs, so I wrote a post on how you can revolutionise your slide decks with just ChatGPT or Gemini. No new tools needed.

Probably the most useful piece of AI content I've ever written! The secret to winning with AI is not better AI tools, it's AI culture!

New post from me: The topic is a bit generic I'll admit, but had a few people ask me for recommendations. At least it's not about AI!

A little late but I had a great time speaking at VARC2025!

An advanced guide to Deep Research tools Part 1 — Choosing the right question It's barely April, and 2025 has already seen an AI breakthrough that I believe will change the work of nearly every office worker on the planet: AI Deep Research (DR) tools. If you've not heard of them, then stop reading…

Amazing tip for doing research using Perplexity AI: Add "filetype:pdf" to your prompt to only get back pdf results! This is great for identifying reports and grey literature. See the 2 screenshots for a comparison.

This is your weekly reminder that AI energy use is probably nothing to be concerned about:

We can use AI to be more human. This week, ChatGPT updated their Image generator and it's insane. My dad is recovering from an operation and & loves WW2, so I whipped this up for him and he loved it so much 🥰

If you're coming to VARC this weekend, swing by my talk! DM me if you want to have a chat too, I'd love to connect with people irl.

“How do I keep up with generative AI? I really don't want to have to read 10 newsletters!” Big update to my concise list of AI creators to follow. I've culled a few, added a few. It's still manageable & high quality. Which AI content creators do you rate?

evolvingimpact.wordpress.com/2023/11/26/w... I've updated my career advice for data scientists / data people wanting to make a difference for animals. I'm always learning more about the job landscape in the movement, & talking to people more knowledgeable than me, so like to keep this post fresh.

Can AI help us make better graphs? Here I show you how I made a custom GPT that will advise you on how to improve your graphs. More generally, I discuss the powerful AI use case of using GPTs to crystallize human expertise into AI assistants that for others to benefit from.

Liked this breakdown of the #behaviouralscience behind an initiative to get kids outside more. The key takeaway? Consider kids AND parents: - It was exciting for kids, but also nostalgic for parents. - Using a scrapbook engaged kids, but also gave parents a momento to keep after.

greenallianceblog.org.uk/2024/11/27/s... The more fertiliser we use, the more food we can grow, but the more we pollute rivers. One solution is to be extremely efficient with fertiliser, by not using it to grow tons of crops to feed to farm animals, massively wasteful.

New report (by me!): factory farming undermines UK food security, but investments in British fruit & veg, & a modest shift to alternative proteins could go a long way to securing our food system. I had a blast writing this 🔥

www.theguardian.com/environment/... these farms will now have to have a plan for the tons of faeces they produce! Amazing that common sense has prevailed, this will give local people the tools they need to save their rivers from factory farming.

Which AI large language model (LLM) should you use? ChatGPT? Claude? Grok? DeepSeek? There are nuanced discussions here, and finding the best model for you takes research and thought. Here's why I think 95% of people should ignore all that and just use ChatGPT.

Here's a fun tip for how to easily get tailored results out of ChatGPT. It's called "role-playing". Ask it to adopt a persona before asking your question. It will give different answers! When you're having it solve work tasks, for you, try having it adopt the persona of *your job title*.

I'll be giving a talk at the upcoming conference of The Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations (PHAIR) I'll be presenting a spicy one, on how most vegan/plant-based messaging studies might be wrong 😬 . But don't worry, I have solutions!

I probably use AI every hour of the workday. Here are a few ways I do that!

The world's largest food and nutrition professional body, The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, backs a plant-based diet, including for those looking to build muscle. https://buff.ly/3XbM3CE