No better time to start learning about that #AI thing everyone's talking about... 📢 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science or Information Science @cornellbowers.bsky.social! If you're interested, apply to either department (yes, either program!) and list me as a potential advisor!

As of June 2025, 66% of Americans have never used ChatGPT. Our new position paper, Attention to Non-Adopters, explores why this matters: AI research is being shaped around adopters—leaving non-adopters’ needs, and key LLM research opportunities, behind. arxiv.org/abs/2510.15951

I'll be at COLM next week! Let me know if you want to chat! @colmweb.org @neilrathi.bsky.social will be presenting our work on multilingual overconfidence in language models and the effects on human overreliance! arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06306

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions. Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased! osf.io/preprints/ps... Thread 🧵

AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.

Thoughtful NPR piece about ChatGPT relationship advice! Thanks for mentioning our research :)

#acl2025 I think there is plenty of evidence for the risks of anthropomorphic AI behavior and design (re: keynote) -- find @myra.bsky.social and I if you want to chat more about this or our "Dehumanizing Machines" ACL 2025 paper

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Do people actually like human-like LLMs? In our #ACL2025 paper HumT DumT, we find a kind of uncanny valley effect: users dislike LLM outputs that are *too human-like*. We thus develop methods to reduce human-likeness without sacrificing performance.

Dear ChatGPT, Am I the Asshole? While Reddit users might say yes, your favorite LLM probably won’t. We present Social Sycophancy: a new way to understand and measure sycophancy as how LLMs overly preserve users' self-image.

How does the public conceptualize AI? Rather than self-reported measures, we use metaphors to understand the nuance and complexity of people’s mental models. In our #FAccT2025 paper, we analyzed 12,000 metaphors collected over 12 months to track shifts in public perceptions.

New ICLR blogpost! 🎉 We argue that understanding the impact of anthropomorphic AI is critical to understanding the impact of AI.

How can we better think and talk about human-like qualities attributed to language technologies like LLMs? In our #CHI2025 paper, we taxonomize how text outputs from cases of user interactions with language technologies can contribute to anthropomorphism. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09870 1/n

Check out our recent work studying anthropormophic AI!

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 🐦🐦

Love this!!