Never ask a man his age, a woman her salary, or GPT-5 whether a seahorse emoji exists

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

"I have wait a long time for this moment, my little red friend." - Emperor Palpatine, probably

Having been playing The Art of Fauna while procrastinating, and it is the most relaxing game with beautiful illustrations of animals. I cannot recommend it enough: theartof.app/fauna/

For a week, we visited @iyadrahwan.bsky.social's Center for Humans and Machines in Berlin, where we have met an incredible array of interdisciplinary researchers. Special thanks to @neeleengelmann.bsky.social for hosting us and @alice-ross.bsky.social for organising the trip from the start!

Have been neglecting Bluesky recently, so I am happy to share a big update 🎉 I will join @cmu.edu as a postdoc in September working with the incomparable @atoosakz.bsky.social and Nihar Shah on understanding risks from LLM co-scientists. If you are in Pittsburgh, I would love to connect!

This thread is incredible.

VCs: oh yeah, developers with AI go brrrrr... METR: Uhm, actually they are 19% slower with AI metr.org/blog/2025-07...

The Edinburgh RL & Agents reading group is back in action after a hiatus. Previous speakers come for all across the world, including DeepMind, CMU, Oxford, NUS, etc. Sign up for some great discussions about cutting-edge RL and agents research.

The absolute state of peer review...

Orban: Budapest Pride ist verboten. Budapest Pride: Liebe kannst du nicht verbieten♥️🏳️‍🌈 Angeblich mehr als 500.000 Menschen vor Ort.

The @braiduk.bsky.social gathering did an amazing job with presenting artists and researchers who address real-world questions around AI by actually engaging with people and learning from them. After hearing two weeks of technical talks at CHAI and RLDM, this was a most welcome break of pace.

I had the most amazing time at RLDM learning a lot about RL and agent foundations, catching up with and meeting new friends. Two things that really stood out to me are: - Agency is Frame Dependent by from Dave Abel - Rethinking Foundations of Continual RL by Michael Bowling #RLDM2025

I am heading to RLDM in Dublin this week to present our work on objective evaluation metrics for explainable RL. Hit me up there or send me a DM to connect if you are around.

Preprint alert 🎉 Introducing the Agentic eXplanations via Interrogative Simulations (AXIS) algo. AXIS integrates multi-agent simulators with LLMs by having the LLMs interrogate the simulator with counterfactual queries over multiple rounds for explaining agent behaviour. arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17801

What can policy makers learn from “AI safety for everyone” (Read here: www.nature.com/articles/s42... ; joint work with @gbalint.bsky.social )? I wrote about some policy lessons for Tech Policy Press.

Delighted to share our most recent paper: "A Scoresheet for Explainable AI" (with John & Sebastian). It will be presented at @aamasconf.bsky.social later this month. 🎬 Short YouTube summary (5 minutes): www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCpf... 📝 Link to the paper on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2502.098...

90-year-old Masako Wakamiya at the final keynote of #CHI2025 shared a cautiously optimistic vision of the future of AI and humanity, especially for the elderly, as we enter the age of 100-year-long lives. Her speech and work is truly inspiring.

One of the things I find most unique about Japan are the unnecessary and questionable motivational quotes on just about anything. "Humans can only put out what has been put into them." says my pre-packed body towel in the fanciest of fonts. Inspiring stuff

The #CHI2025 plushie is looking too cute:

#CHI2025 has a badge tag for rejected author. 🥲I couldn't resist getting one for future use.

I am going to CHI'25. I am super excited for this, so reach out if you are there! I will be presenting our work titled "People Attribute Purpose to Autonomous Vehicles When Explaining Their Behavior: Insights from Cognitive Science for Explainable AI" dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... 🧵 1/7 #CHI2025

Our paper "AI safety for everyone" with Balint Gyevnar is out at Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42... We challenge the narrative that AI safety is primarily about minimizing existential risks from AI. Why does this matter?

'AI Safety for Everyone' is out now in @natmachintell.nature.com! Through an analysis of 383 papers, we find a rich landscape of methods that cover a much larger domain than mainstream notions of AI safety. Our takeaway: Epistemic inclusivity is important, the knowledge is there, we only need use it

I get so frustrated with the dilution of the term ‘literacy’ - in no world should ‘AI literacy’ mean ‘prompt engineering classes’ but apparently here we are

A while ago, I wrote an essay for the Stanford AI100 Study titled "Love, Sex, and AI", discussing the ethical challenges of AI and love. I put it on my webpage and forgot about it. That is, until last week. Since then, it had 4K visitors with <10s average engagement looking for "ai sex".

Out in Philosophical Studies. A 🧵: Read here: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Most AI x-risk discussions focus on a cataclysmic moment—a decisive superintelligent takeover. But what if existential risk doesn’t arrive like a bomb, but seeps in like a leak?

Took an 18km walk today along the beautiful sand dunes of East Lothian. Standing in the horizontal rain, I couldn't help but feel the dramatic beauty of the landscape. Scotland is so beautiful when you get out of the city.

Watching an episode of Numb3rs where an AI "passes the Turing test" which they present as a series of fun tasks, and I'm like... Wait is this where the tech bros get their ideas around the Turing Test from? If it can write a convincing poem and talk about life and death it's sentient?

Call for papers! 🎉 If you have felt confused about evaluation in explainable AI, this workshop is for you! We are excited to go to Bologna @ ECAI'25 as we try to build better methods for evaluating XAI. Can't wait to see what ideas the community will bring! sites.google.com/view/excd-20...

I am glad to see some action against shower-in-a-cans at the university gym. For far too long have our noses been invaded by such famous fragrances as "Aqua Bergamot" and "Black Vanilla".

Every major UK newspaper - left, right, broadsheet, tabloid - is running a front page campaign against copyright carveouts for AI training. I can't remember the last time any political cause had such broad support, let alone one so anti-big tech and so economically consequential.

New preprint 🥳 Explainable RL is suffering from a reproducibility crisis and a lack of standards. To start fixing this, we curate and compare a range of objective human behavioural metrics to build reproducible, comparable, and epistemically grounded research. arxiv.org/abs/2501.19256

Nobel Peace laureate and journalist legend Maria Ressa at #IASEAI25: We need 'radical collaboration' to make facts, not lies, the norm again, especially in the GenAI fueled content craze.

📚🧵1/7 It is finally here!! Only one more week until the print release of our textbook “Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Foundations and Modern Approaches” with @mitpress.bsky.social! What you get, why you should be interested and more, all below in a short 🧵👇

Hello world! Happy to explore a new place for #academicsky. I will try to post about research, trivia, memes, or just interesting stuff re explainability in AI and AI safety. As a start, here is an interesting paper on human-AI coevolution which I have read recently: arxiv.org/pdf/2306.13723