🤖 The #CodeAndCulture talk series restarts with a talk by @andreskarjus.bsky.social on "LLMs, Big Data and the Agentic Future". Register here: plu.sh/codeandculture

New preprint out, of a chapter in the upcoming Handbook of Cultural Analytics: "Large Language Models, Machine-Assisted Cultural Analytics, and the Agentic Turn" Feedback and critique very much welcome. Tell me if I missed something important!

It is only Màth if it's produced in the Mathagne region, by the Mathematicians' Guild following the Méthode Traditionnelle

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 4d ago

This document is going to be an assigned reading in college classes that cover this moment in time, there's a lot happening in a few paragraphs... www.ahmath.org/statements

These thinking/reporting traces really are nice to watch scroll by (an extremely nerdy kind of joy I know)

Andres Karjus@andreskarjus.bsky.social · 3w ago

So all these nice corpora gated behind bad search interfaces, useless KWIC views, OCR behind scans, browser-only, no download. Now you can just get codex/ccode to dissect the urls/search/display interface until it figures out how to scrape anyway and have it download full datasets? How convenient.

So all these nice corpora gated behind bad search interfaces, useless KWIC views, OCR behind scans, browser-only, no download. Now you can just get codex/ccode to dissect the urls/search/display interface until it figures out how to scrape anyway and have it download full datasets? How convenient.

Had the pleasure of participating and also talking at the Paide Arvamusfestival ("Opinions festival") this weekend, got invited to a panel on the use of AI & automation in migration management and background analytics (while still leaving the final decisions to humans) Longer post lnkd.in/p/d9_qYxfb

If you missed A. Karjus's brilliant presentation on AI in Research last month, you can now watch it on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Daef... The AI-teh seminar series continues in September.

AI-teh seminar 08.06.26. Andres Karjus- AI in Research: from Annotators to Assistants and Agents

YouTube video by Digihumanitaaria keskus

youtube.com

Andres Karjus@andreskarjus.bsky.social · 3mo ago

That's not a "real" paper btw But in a recent workshop for @digitsut.bsky.social I talked AI agents &how it's now trivial to gen full (tho likely mediocre) papers&theses in ~1h. Asked for example topic, had codex mine data&write; they uploaded it w slides Now Google Scholar wants to index it.

New preprint w Janika Leoste and Tiia Õun: "Student Evaluation of Repeated AI Feedback Across a Semester of Writing" arxiv.org/abs/2607.16115 where we investigate how real AI classroom usage affects student perceptions and progress, using an (anonymized) corpus of ~3000 homeworks by 300 students

Actually, more I think about it, for academic-industry incentives (more papers&cites; not the same as good science goals) the quality doesn't even matter that much :/ Sure could be improved, but as more ppl use agents, what matters is whether its enough GEO'd to get cited by agents &pass AI review.

Andres Karjus@andreskarjus.bsky.social · 3mo ago

That's not a "real" paper btw But in a recent workshop for @digitsut.bsky.social I talked AI agents &how it's now trivial to gen full (tho likely mediocre) papers&theses in ~1h. Asked for example topic, had codex mine data&write; they uploaded it w slides Now Google Scholar wants to index it.

That's not a "real" paper btw But in a recent workshop for @digitsut.bsky.social I talked AI agents &how it's now trivial to gen full (tho likely mediocre) papers&theses in ~1h. Asked for example topic, had codex mine data&write; they uploaded it w slides Now Google Scholar wants to index it.

What is evolutionary linguistics? In this brief article for the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (with Jonas Nölle & @andreskarjus.bsky.social), we cover the key questions and methodologies of the field. 📄🔓 Preprint (open access): osf.io/preprints/ps...

In light of recent AI writing debates, NeurIPS rejecting papers based on AI-detector results (lol), and certain academics piling AI user colleagues on the other app... What is actually more important in an academic paper: - the prose, narrative, writing, or - the question, method, result, insight?

Now out in @tandfresearch.bsky.social International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction: "Expertise Elevates AI Usage: Experimental Evidence Comparing Laypeople and Professional Artists" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 50 pro artists vs randos vs AI agent used image generators to do art:

New paper published with @andreskarjus.bsky.social as shared 1st author: We show experimentally that professional artists' skill set can transfer to making images with generative AI; tested with artists, laypeople, and GPT-4o copying an image or creatively diverging from it, only by prompting.

Expertise Elevates AI Usage: Experimental Evidence Comparing Laypeople and Professional Artists

Generative AI’s novel capacities raise questions about the future role of human expertise: does it level the playing field between professional artists and laypeople, or does expertise enhance AI u...

tandfonline.com

Amazing scene at a socsci internet research seminar. At the end a comp sci guy asks if there's maybe practical takeaways, action points we could summarize. First gets accused of "sounding like chatgpt", then a socsci lady pulls out a pack and goes well no but can I interest you in these tarot cards?

Prediction: - most major publishers will AI-automate desk decisions and/or review in next few years. A similar pipeline in reverse will be sufficient for their (already low) level of review quality. - open access will increase (to get cited by agents) NO WAY a capitalist enterprise will... 1/

Per Engzell@pengzell.bsky.social · 5mo ago

What can we learn from automating an entire quantitative social science paper, from prompt to finished product? Thread about ongoing work with @natewilmers.bsky.social 1/12 Paper: osf.io/preprints/so...

Random thought, these axes are prob correlated right? AI use ↔ anti-AI dogmatism imposter syndr. ↔ intel. arrogance/authority attachment Imposters be like "I don't know shit, neither does this thing, let's go" The 2nd type "But using this🦜 signals inferiority, lowers me to the level of layman, bad

Been attending #Evolang this week in Bulgaria. Many very cool talks as usual. Presented our recent work in the AI session, on idea dynamics around industrialization&environment, using corpora+LLMs (w @s-mertelt.bsky.social, Muhammad Okky Ibrohim) #evolang2026 @evolangconf.bsky.social

A problem yes, but I suspect a lot here stems from reference management practices ("I do refs by hand" crowd) in academia generally, amped by AI. What amazes tho is that these 30% profit margin companies 3yrs in have not invested enough yet in automated ref checking (easier if DOI&bibtex required)

T. Ryan Gregory 🇨🇦@tryangregory.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Lazy use of AI by half-ass researchers is putting digital asbestos everywhere, which will be a huge pain in the ass to clean up. Just do your damn job as a scholar or let someone else with more integrity and competence have your position. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Estonian national broadcaster covered our visit to the Education and Youth board, where we discussed AI-powered semi-autonomous essay scoring for the Estonian school leaving exams: www.err.ee/1609964528/h... Tech details in preprint arxiv.org/abs/2601.16314

#DHNB2026 Digital Humanities in the Nordics&Baltics conference starts in Aarhus, Denmark; intro from local organizers + first plenary by @folgertk.bsky.social & @mikekestemont.bsky.social on using the unseen species model for several interesting historical case studies. #DHNB #DH @dhnb.bsky.social

About a year ago, I published my final PhD paper “fruit-SALAD”. Today it won the scientific paper award in Digital and Media Culture at Tallinn University 🎉 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Together with my co-authors @andreskarjus.bsky.social , Mikhail Tamm, and @schichmax.bsky.social,... (1/4)

fruit-SALAD: A Style Aligned Artwork Dataset to reveal similarity perception in image embeddings - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - fruit-SALAD: A Style Aligned Artwork Dataset to reveal similarity perception in image embeddings

nature.com

Another day, another clearly AI generated review for a paper. Is that now the new normal, like, academics and editors just quietly accepted it? Hollow words asking us to randomly "discuss more", "consider this", "address that", and we're supposed to respect it as expert opinion to follow?

a man in a leather jacket and tie is saying cool cool cool cool cool cool cool

ALT: a man in a leather jacket and tie is saying cool cool cool cool cool cool cool

media.tenor.com

New preprint out: "Machine-Assisted Grading of Nationwide School-Leaving Essay Exams with LLMs and Statistical NLP" arxiv.org/abs/2601.16314 We test LLMs on graduation essays written in a low-resource language (EST), using official rubrics &benchmarking data directly from the national exam gov body.

Come work with us! Tallinn Uni is hiring a second lecturer in DH&AI. Estonian proficiency not required, foreign applicants welcome, required phd can be in progress (expected to be completed), competitive salary+benefits, nice working environment close to the sea candidate.recrur.com/public/jobad...

In Madrid via EdTech Talents for a month, visiting our partner JdeRobot, furthering collaborations w private sector &academia, while continuing development of a prototype meant to synergyze with the other couple of related projects we got going on at Tallinn University. Happy to meet for coffee too!

Amazing what counts as a "real" and "digital" signature in different parts of Europe, from the "please print-sign-scan and make it look badly scanned=real" of Italy to the "hey here's your name but in a MSWord95 kinda font" of Spain.

Prediction: publishing/peer review will go full circle before any hope of reformation. Already now: AI-written papers reviewed by R's using AI Next: AI papers weighed by AI editors for AI review; publications summarized by research bots...to write AI papers.

Lil late to the "AI is killing edu" party, as I haven't been teaching students as much as training educators &businesses last 3 yrs, but I guess I now know the pain of having to assign A to the perfect (likely AI) submission and a C to the imperfect but likely human attempt. Is there a word for it?

Went on TV to talk about the dangers of sprawling generated content, misinformation and deepfakes, in the Estonian "Õhtu!" (Evening!) talk show of Kanal2 Clip here (in Estonian) ohtu.kanal2.ee/8380266/ohtu...