Headed to Vermont for IC2S2! I will be giving two parallel talks: 🎤 Wed 29, 10:45-12:15 (AI in Education). Ongoing work w/ @wikieducation.bsky.social on the impact of LLMs in Wikipedia. 🎤 Wed 29, 2:15-3:45 (HCI and practice). LLMs persuasiveness in commercial settings.

Are you a Bluesky user or developer? Princeton's HCI group is conducting an IRB-approved interview study on perspectives about generative AI (genAI) in decentralized social media. Participation includes: • 45–60 min Zoom interview • $30 USD digital gift card Signup: forms.gle/EDmcLnjbamtb...

New preprint! We introduce a new benchmark, SciConBench, with 9.11k scientific questions derived from Cochrane Systematic Reviews. We find evidence that frontier AI agents **cannot** synthesize scientific conclusions well. A thread 🧵 w/ @hayoungjung.bsky.social & others!

📝Excited to share our new preprint, “AI Assistance for Discretionary Work: Increasing Feedback Provision in Higher Education”: arxiv.org/abs/2606.03095 A thread 🧵 1/8

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

My new post discusses the probable future of AI-assisted shopping! Drawing on our recent paper, I argue that if LLMs become the interface through which we search, compare, and buy things, we need a much sharper line between advertising and advice! doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/when-the-a...

When the AI Assistant Becomes the Ad

This post describes our recent paper: Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations

doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

Important thread and paper. This is one of my biggest worries about chatbots, especially when combined with roleplay and any kind of user-chatbot "relationship." And now imagine persuasion for politics and other topics, not just purchasing choices...

Manoel Horta Ribeiro@manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Our results show that conversational agents can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, most users cannot tell when it is happening, and existing transparency mechanisms are insufficient. We call for further regulatory scrutiny and structural safeguards.

🛍️Major AI companies are increasingly embedding sponsored content into chatbot conversations. Across two preregistered experiments (N=2,012), we test how effectively AI can steer consumers toward sponsored products in a realistic shopping scenario. 📝https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04263

Deepfake pornography isn’t going away just because we are passing laws and taking down a couple of big websites. Our new pre-print, led by @aedcv.bsky.social suggests that the sharing of this material continued to prosper even after platform and policy shocks. arxiv.org/abs/2602.02754

We are looking for a doctoral researcher to work with us on a supercool project in collaboration with linguists. The deadline is Feb 15th, contact me if you have any questions! stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/9...

Doctoral Position in Social Data Science

Deadline: 15.02.2026

stellen.uni-konstanz.de

Do reasoning models have real “Aha!” moments—mid-chain realizations where they intrinsically self-correct? In a new pre-print, “The Illusion of Insight in Reasoning Models," led by @liv-daliberti.bsky.social we provide strong evidence that they do not! 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2601.00514

We rely on benchmarks to answer questions they weren’t designed to ask. This post thoughtfully explores the "empiricism gap" in ML/CS, and what social-science methods can offer. A great read for both CS and social sciences folks.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro@manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 8mo ago

In a new blog post, I contrast two flavors of empiricism: the one practiced in the social sciences and the one practiced in ML/CS. I argue that we need both, given that CS is increasingly about "claims," and not just constructing artifacts. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

🌱✨ Life update: I just started my PhD at Princeton University! I will be supervised by @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social and affiliated with Princeton CITP. It's only been a month, but the energy feels amazing —very grateful for such a welcoming community. Excited for what’s ahead! 🚀

Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use. In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement. arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776

✍️ I wrote a short piece for the #SPSPblog about our work on AI persuasion (w/ @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social @ricgallotti.bsky.social Robert West). Read it at: t.co/MipJKWbb1h. Thanks @andyluttrell.bsky.social @prpietromonaco.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social for your invitation and feedback!

🚨YouTube is a key source of health info, but it’s also rife with dangerous myths on opioid use disorder (OUD), a leading cause of death in the U.S. To understand the scale of such misinformation, our #EMNLP2025 paper introduces MythTriage, a scalable system to detect OUD myth🧵

EPFL, ETH Zurich & CSCS just released Apertus, Switzerland’s first fully open-source large language model. Trained on 15T tokens in 1,000+ languages, it’s built for transparency, responsibility & the public good. Read more: actu.epfl.ch/news/apertus...

Another paper showing AI (Claude 3.5) is more persuasive than the average human, even when the humans had financial incentives In this case, either AI or humans (paid if they were persuasive) tried to convince quiz takers (paid for accuracy) to pick either right or wrong answers on a quiz.

📣 Super excited to organize the first workshop on ✨NLP for Democracy✨ at COLM @colmweb.org!! Check out our website: sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e... Call for submissions (extended abstracts) due June 19, 11:59pm AoE #COLM2025 #LLMs #NLP #NLProc #ComputationalSocialScience

NLP 4 Democracy - COLM 2025

sites.google.com

A study in Nature Human Behaviour finds that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, can be more persuasive than humans 64% of the time in online debates when adapting their arguments based on personalised information about their opponents. go.nature.com/4j9ibyE 🧪

AI can be more persuasive than humans in debates, scientists find

AI can be more persuasive than humans in debates, scientists find

Study author warns of implications for elections and says ‘malicious actors’ are probably using LLM tools already Artificial intelligence can do just as well as humans, if not better, when it comes to persuading others in a debate, and not just because it cannot shout, a study has found. Experts say the results are concerning, not least as it has potential implications for election integrity. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a powerful tool for persuading people, for better or worse.

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do

OpenAI’s GPT-4 is much better at getting people to accept its point of view during an argument than humans are—but there’s a catch.

technologyreview.com

📢📜 Excited to share that our paper "On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4" has been published in Nature Human Behaviour! 🤖 Key takeaway: LLMs can already reach superhuman persuasiveness, especially when given access to personalized information www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 - Nature Human Behaviour

Salvi et al. find that GPT-4 outperforms humans in debates when given basic sociodemographic data. With personalization, GPT-4 had 81.2% higher odds of post-debate agreement than humans.

nature.com

“Obviously as soon as people see that you can persuade people more with LLMs, they’re going to start using them. I find it both fascinating and terrifying,” says @frasalvi.bsky.social Read more on persuasive chatbots in my rather terrifying piece for @nature.com 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI is more persuasive than people in online debates

When given information about its human opponents, the large language model GPT-4 was able to make particularly convincing arguments.

nature.com

If your NSF grant has been terminated, please, please report it here: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... Collecting this information is supremely helpful to organize and facilitate a response.

I am recruiting 2 PhD students for Fall'25 @csaudk.bsky.social to work on bleeding-edge topics in #NLProc #LLMs #AIAgents (e.g. LLM reasoning, knowledge-seeking agents, and more). Details: www.cs.au.dk/~clan/openings Deadline: May 1, 2025 Please boost! cc: @aicentre.dk @wikiresearch.bsky.social

Open positions and projects

### Open semester and Master's projects If you're an AU student looking for a semester project, a Bachelor project, or an MS thesis project, please refer to [this list](projects). ### Prospective PhD ...

cs.au.dk

🚨 #IC2S2’25 Call for Abstract deadline is just around the corner—Feb 24, 2025 Submit your abstract now: www.ic2s2-2025.org/submit-abstr... and join us in Norrköping, Sweden. Tutorials announcement coming soon!

New tool to estimate the level of participation in collective action expressed in natural language. Applied to social media, it can produce large-scale and granular estimates of behavior change wrt collective action. github.com/ariannap13/e... @nerdsitu.bsky.social @itu.dk @carlsbergfondet.dk

Arianna Pera@ariannapera.bsky.social · 2y ago

Excited to share the tool @lajello.bsky.social & I built to predict social media participation in collective action! It moves beyond keywords, tracking activism stages across topics. See it in action with climate activism on Reddit 🌱 Check it out: arxiv.org/abs/2501.07368 @nerdsitu.bsky.social

Just arrived in Trento for cs2italy.org, the first Italian conference on CSS: excited to see the Italian community gathering together! 🤖 I'll be presenting our work on AI persuasion [1] tomorrow morning at 11:15 to session 1A — come say hello! [1] arxiv.org/abs/2403.14380

CS2Italy

Join the premier CS2 Italy Conference, a pivotal event for computational social scientists in Italy and internationally. Scheduled for 2025, this conference will feature interdisciplinary collaboratio...

cs2italy.org