One of the most-discussed PNAS articles on Reddit last month was “Cultural evolution of beauty standards.” Explore the article: https://ow.ly/i96h50ZfmoY

The study was published in PNAS by @louisboucherie.com, August Lohse (DTU Denmark), @diesagar.bsky.social (@nunetsi.bsky.social), Katharina Ledebur (@csh.ac.at), and Karolina Sliwa (@wuvienna.bsky.social) 🧪 More about the research: shorturl.at/GGPce 🛋️ Read the paper: shorturl.at/h62Rp

Fashion Looks More Diverse Today, But The Body Ideal Hasn't Changed In 25 Years

From the outside, fashion looks like a different industry. But according to a new study, the body ideal at the heart of the industry has barely shifted.

csh.ac.at

More inclusive campaigns, “plus-sized” models, body-positive language. The #fashion industry has grown more vocal about body diversity. But has the industry’s overall body ideal really changed? A new study of nearly 800,000 fashion images says: not really. 🧵👇 #fashionsky #healthdata #mentalhealth

Fashion may look more diverse today, but the ideal body type hasn’t changed in 25 years. A new PNAS study co-authored by NetSI PhD student @diesagar.bsky.social analyzed 793K+ fashion images and found diversity often comes through already-marginalized models. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Before you watch the Devil Wears Prada 2, take a look at our new paper in PNAS on the dangerous effects of Emily Blunt’s “cube of cheese” diet!!!

Louis Boucherie@louisboucherie.com · 3mo ago

Is the fashion industry actually becoming more inclusive? We analyzed 793,199 records over 25 years to find out. Our results are published today in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

AI systems are now making decisions about you — who gets hired, whose content gets removed, whose voice gets heard. My new paper finds something concerning: LLMs infer your ethnic identity from subtle textual cues… … and use it to discriminate against you. 🧵 1/

Large Language Models Reproduce Racial Stereotypes When Used for Text Annotation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated text annotation in tasks ranging from academic research to content moderation and hiring. Across 19 LLMs and two experiments totaling m...

arxiv.org

Great new preprint by a student in my lab, demonstrating how many benchmarks and safeguards of LLMs are ill-conceived and unreliable. Excellent thread breaking down the core findings. arxiv.org/abs/2603.23485

Failure of contextual invariance in gender inference with large language models

Standard evaluation practices assume that large language model (LLM) outputs are stable under contextually equivalent formulations of a task. Here, we test this assumption in the setting of gender inf...

arxiv.org

Sagar Kumar@diesagar.bsky.social · 4mo ago

With AI being deployed in just about every industry imaginable, a lot of time and energy is put into evaluating #LLMs to make sure the systems we deploy are behaving the way we want them to. These evaluations and benchmarks, however, are usually done using single, isolated sentences.

MASSIVE thank you to the brilliant @ariel-flint.bsky.social @lajello.bsky.social and @baronca.bsky.social for their help on this work!! Check out the preprint if you want to learn more: arxiv.org/abs/2603.23485 #LingSky #ResponsibleAI #AI #NLP #MachineLearning

Failure of contextual invariance in gender inference with large language models

Standard evaluation practices assume that large language model (LLM) outputs are stable under contextually equivalent formulations of a task. Here, we test this assumption in the setting of gender inf...

arxiv.org

Are our evaluations actually measuring any stable properties of LLMs? 🧵

Finally learning Montague Grammar and it has unironically brought me to tears because of how convoluted and ridiculous and well thought out and elegant it is #lingsky #semantics

"Not evil in some movie sense. Silent partners in a real world sense." well damn

Big Bad Booty Daddy@bamaslymm.blacksky.app · 6mo ago

How China is reporting on the Epstein Files.

telling myself that if i actually learned what a sheaf is then i would be far too powerful and that’s why it continues to evade my understanding

say what you want about the findings, i can’t get over the fact that they have an interpolated line connecting the dots in a categorical plot 😭

Brendan Nyhan@brendannyhan.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Put writing high quality literary text on the list of things that AIs used to not be able to do but now can do With fine-tuning, now outperforming MFA-trained expert writers at emulating award-winning authors when rated blindly by MFA-trained experts papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Thrilled to see this out! Congrats to collaborators and please give it a read. Since we wrote this, it’s only become more pressing and timely.

Alyssa Smith@cetaceanneeded.bsky.social · 9mo ago

hot off the (virtual) press in @transstudies.bsky.social: a collaboration with @pranavgoel.bsky.social, @crazybrokeasian.bsky.social, and @diesagar.bsky.social on information flows in US local & national news about transgender people (spoiler alert: it’s complicated) doi.org/10.57814/557...

hot off the (virtual) press in @transstudies.bsky.social: a collaboration with @pranavgoel.bsky.social, @crazybrokeasian.bsky.social, and @diesagar.bsky.social on information flows in US local & national news about transgender people (spoiler alert: it’s complicated) doi.org/10.57814/557...

the state of media right now has me feeling like frankie muniz in big fat liar

calling him a "conservative activist" is... a fascinating framing

Northern Ireland man from Lisburn kidnapped by Trump’s Ice raids because he “looked like a Mexican”. He had the correct visa, all his documents. He’s never been in trouble with police. Held in terrible conditions. A fellow captive couldn’t get his medication and dropped dead of a heart attack

Belfast Telegraph@belfasttelegraph.co.uk · 11mo ago

Horrors of Trump detention centre: Lisburn man tells his story after arrest for 'looking like a Mexican' Lee Stinton was lifted by US immigration police on an American street — in an incident he compared to a kidnapping. Here, he tells us his story.

“Jimenez Rosa, a legal permanent resident and mother of four U.S. citizens, was detained over what her lawyer believes was a decades-old, personal-use marijuana charge, which is no longer a crime in Massachusetts today… “I was just like, ‘Girls, we might never see your mother again in this country’”

ICE released this Mass. mom with no phone, 30 miles from home in the rain after detainment for a sealed marijuana conviction

Federal authorities refused to tell the Canton woman's husband or lawyer on what grounds she was being detained until shortly before her release.

masslive.com

Boston’s Logan Airport clearly has a preference when it comes to fundamental particles because I haven’t seen a Fermion sign anywhere

Just published my first little bit of science journalism on this great article by @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Jennifer Culbertson about whether communicative efficiencies in language (in this case, differential case marking) are learned or acquired through use. Please give it a look!!

Second, with a large team of authors, led by @anniewald.bsky.social, we study which (personal, temporal, spatial, affordance-based) properties of incidences of extrajudicial police killings facilitate public attention on social media.

Could be more proud to see this publication out!!! So grateful for the wonderful team. Please give it a look!!

Annie Waldherr@anniewald.bsky.social · last yr.

*New publication in @sscratsage.bsky.social!* The deaths of Black victims of police violence have become focusing events for #BlackLivesMatter. We wanted to know why some victims receive a high amount of social media attention wile others do not. Available #OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1177/0894...

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

LLM research for the last few years has been constantly saying "I can't put this in the paper--nobody would use a model that just predicts the next token to make decisions about [insert life-altering scenario here]" then seeing an article titled "Can AI help make decisions about nuclear warfare?"

This is the closest thing i’ve come to a noumenal experience. i have literally no reference for it. it is only itself-in-itself. every part of it contradicts itself in so many ways that the only thing left is The Lacanian Real. The Truth.

spending my weekend hate-reading Frege because I’ve realized it’s actually important for me to know if I’m ever to dispute it

“jordan’s furniture is like the narnia of massachusetts”

pragmatics is such a funny topic in linguistics because it’s like “what if everything you worried people were thinking about you was true”

I almost can't believe that Elon Musk's AI called for the extermination of the Jewish people yesterday, and today not a single Congressional Democrat announced they were leaving his media network. A party that often claims to act against antisemitism didn't do jack shit about straight up Nazism.