If you're at #COLM2026, come check out our poster for "Spoiler Alert" (arxiv.org/abs/2604.09854). We ask why LLM fiction is so bad at holding narrative tension, and create a metric to measure tension in short stories. What improves LLM fiction on this metric, it turns out, is narrative planning.

Prospective PhD students: if you work on computational humanities, cultural analytics and/or cultural AI, pls apply to Duke English! We're recruiting in these areas & you'd join a vibrant community. Candidates with training in both lit studies + CS/sciences esp welcome. Email me if any questions!

Humanistic AI conference at Duke (9/25-6), full schedule forthcoming but speaker/title list is up! We have an amazing line up - @tedunderwood.com @laurenfklein.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social @hoytlong.bsky.social @eduede.bsky.social + others; if in area, please come! sites.duke.edu/humanisticai...

Really worthwhile CFP f/ Computational Humanities Research on "Peripheries," inviting work that uses data-driven approaches to recovering marginalized, lost voices in the cultural record/archive & what's been lost through processes of mass corpus digitization: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Peripheries

Call for Papers: Peripheries

cambridge.org

Happy Pub Day to We the Platform and many many thanks to my editor Philip and the Columbia UP team for supporting the book!

Philip Leventhal@philipleventhal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"[A] sharp and welcome rebuttal to the fatalistic 'end of literature' narrative. WE THE PLATFORM maps the complex convergence of legacy publishing and platform capitalism" - Rita Raley WE THE PLATFORM by Aarthi Vadde: bit.ly/44g6ZeG #LiteratureNow @aarthivadde.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

Preprint with @mariaa.bsky.social and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social on how real people are writing fiction with LLMs based on the Wildchat dataset here arxiv.org/abs/2606.22748.

AI Fiction in the Wild

Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatG...

arxiv.org

Patrick Sui and I are hosting an #ICLR2026 social for anyone with background/interest in the humanities! Room 210, 12-1:30pm on Friday 24 April!! Humanities-adjacent, humanities-curious, everyone is welcome! Should be a fun group! :)

If you're at #ICLR and interested in humanities-centered work on AI (plus a radical take on the problem of LLM hallucination), Patrick Sui will be presenting our paper "Critical Confabulation: Can LLMs Hallucinate for Social Good?" Poster session details are here: iclr.cc/virtual/2026...

I wrote about Infinite Jest’s wild 30-year journey online—from feminist YouTube stunts to sexist 4chan posts to Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads. How far down the rabbit hole do DFW bros go? What do the memes reveal about our relationship to literature & the internet? lareviewofbooks.org/article/infi...

‘Infinite Jest,’ the Internet, and the Politics of Reading | Los Angeles Review of Books

On the internet reception and collective reading of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary reissue.

lareviewofbooks.org

Excited to announce, w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social, @ari-holtzman.bsky.social & Emily Wenger, that we won a Schmidt Science AI grant to build AI systems for storytelling + narrative world making. How do you get AI to tell immersive, believable, interesting stories? www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-humanit...

2026 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute Development Awards - Schmidt Sciences

Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) is supporting 11 global interdisciplinary research teams to explore collaborative AI interventions with the potential to catalyze major bre...

schmidtsciences.org

"80% of the time" bafflingly misleading way to frame the use of AI IN AN EXPERIMENTAL TASK where people were explicitly given this as an option, not some kind of observation across all their waking lives.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The. Rise. Of. Cognitive. Surrender. Study finds that people who use GenAI chatbots rely on them 80% of the time, and develop almost no capacity to recognize when a chatbot is feeding them faulty information. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Great 2-year postdoc for a digital humanities/I school/computational culture scholar to work on computer vision + film/TV w/ great colleagues @ Distant Viewing Lab @nolauren.bsky.social (U of Richmond). These guys are doing cutting edge stuff, apply! richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...

Excited to share this new paper - accepted at CHI - testing the affordances of AI assistance for literary-cultural interpretation or "close reading" w/ @jiayinzhi.bsky.social @mnlee.bsky.social + @hoytlong.bsky.social. Can AI help students/people interpret cultural objects? arxiv.org/html/2603.06...

𝑪𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝑰 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒑 𝒖𝒔 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒕 𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆? In our new #CHI2026 paper, we studied how AI assistance affects close reading poems — not just how well people interpret poems, but also the pleasure derived from close reading. closereading-ai.app #AI #HCI #closereading #humanities #culture #poetry (1/13)

[AI and Close Reading] Can AI help us interpret culture?

AI is already becoming part of how people read cultural texts online. What does AI do for cultural interpretation? We explored this question in a randomized experiment investigating the impact of AI a...

closereading-ai.app

The talk is based on a paper I co wrote with @eduede.bsky.social @hoytlong.bsky.social & Patrick Sui that is accepted and forthcoming at ICLR 2026. Here's the preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07722

Critical Confabulation: Can LLMs Hallucinate for Social Good?

LLMs hallucinate, yet some confabulations can have social affordances if carefully bounded. We propose critical confabulation (inspired by critical fabulation from literary and social theory), the use...

arxiv.org

I'm on a 38(!)-author paper just published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, "Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology". We splice Schleiermacher and hermeneutic theory into AI debates, arguing AI are "context machines". www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

Frontiers | Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology

Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be...

frontiersin.org

New paper on Why Slop Matters w/ great group of co authors (@hoytlong.bsky.social @eduede.bsky.social @ari-holtzman.bsky.social + others not on Bluesky) from ACM AI Letters. We try to move the debate re: AI Slop past normative, neg claims & towards parsing its social uses. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Why Slop Matters | ACM AI Letters

AI-generated “slop” is often seen as digital pollution. We argue that this dismissal of the topic risks missing important aspects of AI Slop which deserve rigorous study. AI Slop serves a social funct...

dl.acm.org

New paper in AI & Society w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social + @teddyroland.bsky.social! We simulated 101 "AI authors" to see how LLMs imagine creativity & cultural distinction + compared them to real historical authors. What do AI authors want & how do they pursue success? link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The social AI author: modeling creativity and distinction in simulated cultural fields - AI & SOCIETY

This article examines generative AI models as sociocultural actors, focusing on how they reproduce and constrain notions of authorship and identity within the contemporary U.S. literary field. Through...

link.springer.com

New article in AI & Society with @richardjeanso.bsky.social and @hoytlong.bsky.social 🎉 We wanted to know how AI might affect cultural fields like literary publishing. But cultural production is complex! So we piloted a new method we call “social simulation.” rdcu.be/eTkMy

Honored to be part of this initiative to explore "Humanistic AI"! Hosted at the University of Chicago and led by @hoytlong.bsky.social and Chris Kennedy, we're collaborating in a series of interdisciplinary workshops and projects to think about how the humanities can contribute to AI and vice versa.

New UChicago project explores how humanities can advance AI research

Interdisciplinary group at the Neubauer Collegium to examine what generative AI reveals about humanistic knowledge and creativity

news.uchicago.edu

In case you missed it, this "Doing AI Differently" funding call should be of interest to humanities scholars with technical experience, computer scientists with humanities grounding, or anyone whose work spans both domains. Take a look and please consider applying! www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

Expressions of interest: artificial intelligence humanities sandpits: Canada, UK and US

AHRC and SSHRC invite expressions of interest to attend a humanities-led, interdisciplinary research sandpit looking to put humanities insights and methodologies at the heart of artificial intelligenc...

ukri.org

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

Donald Trump does NOT want you to share this footage of his pathetically tiny birthday parade crowd.

Excited to share our preprint "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research” We're open to feedback—read & share thoughts! @laurenfklein.bsky.social @mmvty.bsky.social @docdre.distributedblackness.net @mariaa.bsky.social @jmjafrx.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social

Aaaaah good timing, published today! "we introduce Mini Worldlit, a manually curated dataset of 1,192 works of contemporary fiction from 13 countries, representing nine languages" By @andrewpiper.bsky.social, @dbamman.bsky.social, Christina Han, Jens Bjerring-Hansen, @hoytlong.bsky.social, et al.

Maria Antoniak@mariaa.bsky.social · 2y ago

Ok I want this but more books per year (or decade) and somehow balanced across multiple languages (ideally English, French, and German). I doubt it exists... but maybe someone knows of something?

If you're depressed that non-expert readers prefer AI-written poetry to the classics, perhaps try Matt's quiz. You may discover that the real finding here is the huge gulf between your own taste and that of non-expert readers ... a gulf that has likely existed at least since, oh, IA Richards?

Matt Clancy@mattsclancy.bsky.social · 2y ago

I made a Google quiz using the poems listed on the paper’s OSF site if you want to try your luck at guessing which are human and which are LLM. forms.gle/nGCGawDb9c6f...

Interested in writing with AI? ✍️ Please apply to be a **postdoc** in my group through the UChicago DSI Scholars program! 🤠 - Research in my group: minalee-research.github.io/research.html - Application: datascience.uchicago.edu/research/pos... (review begins on Dec 6)

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media.tenor.com

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work with me at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for creative students with interests in #NLP and #CulturalAnalytics. Boulder is a lovely college town 30 minutes from Denver and 1 hour from Rocky Mountain National Park 😎 Apply by December 15th!

Internet studies people unite! Internet studies starter pack is here - incomplete, skewed etc etc but some fantastic folks, to help us all rebuild our social networks. Happy to add you if I left you out! Please circulate, and here it is: go.bsky.app/KHmxfWf

AOC returning to BlueSky and you can feel the place light up...

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media.tenor.com