I am an academic. You cannot kill my career in a way that matters.

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 2w ago

Well other things can talk now, which is new

Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)@iwriteok.bsky.social · 2w ago

would love to hear even a single actual argument about how AI "changes the nature of humanity" not based in fanciful speculation

When a chatbot uses anthropomorphic companion language like "I'm worried about you" or "You are great, dear", people actually see it as less likable, humanlike, and trustworthy, according to our new simulation study @GoogleResearch with people from the US, UK, India, and Nigeria.

Why did ChatGPT go viral? Did AI safety work like Bostrom/Yudkowsky ignite the AGI race? Who will shape the future? I'm amazed how few social scientists work on these topics, but we need social theory of AI, like econ theory from the Industrial Revolution. Our new paper... arxiv.org/abs/2608.24748

We need a sociology of conscious machines. What will it be like to live amongst these "digital minds"? Very few social scientists are thinking about this, and I'm grateful one of my recent talks on the topic, at the inaugural CIMC conference, is now online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIUU...

Digital Minds The Sociology of Conscious Machines - Jacy Reese Anthis

YouTube video by California Institute for Machine Consciousness

youtube.com

Which LLMs tend to facilitate delusion-linked behaviors in realistic multi-turn conversations? We tested 14 models with DelusionEval and found that every evaluated LLM exhibited some of these behaviors, with large differences across categories and model families. 🧵

Can humans be biased against AI? Does an LLM like Claude or a robot "clanker" matter less just because it is artificial: made of chips and wires instead of flesh and blood? With 5 preregistered studies, our new paper rigorously validates a psychometric scale for "substratism" 📝

With my ACL PC abilities, I wanted to characterize who these folks are, whether they're actually "outsiders", whether their papers are much less likely to be accepted, is this growth just LLM slop? The whole analsis is here medium.com/@jurgens_245...

Is the ACL Rolling Review actually broken?

ARR is broken! ARR is being overwhelmed with papers from outsiders! LLM-generated slop is ruining our peer review! There are not enough…

medium.com

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

Chats with AI bots have convinced evolutionary biologist but most experts say he is being misled by mimicry

theguardian.com

Not all AGI is the same! Our 2nd #CHI2026 paper disentangles how "autonomous" AI is more threatening while "sentient" AI deserves more moral concern. These mental models will determine how people react to future AI. Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... Blog: www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/autonom...

Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.

dl.acm.org

Our new #CHI2026 paper identifies "digital companionship": overlapping use of ChatGPT AI assistants and Replika AI companions. People like that they are not fully human: always forgiving you, having a reset button.. Blog: www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/digital... Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

How do you align AI in a world of plural, conflicting, and evolving human values? A starting point is human society itself. @sydneylevine.bsky.social and I are hiring a postdoc at NYU to combine insights from cultural evolution, computational moral cognition, and AI safety. Please share widely!1/

After the #CHI2026 opening plenary, catch Janet Pauketat presenting "Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI" in session Relationships with AI: 11:15-12:45 Disentangling the two oft-conflated faculties can help us make sense of human-AI interaction: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

dl.acm.org

Hola! Excited to hear what you all have been up to! #CHI2026

Chinese government decides to regulate AI from the right to personal likeness, child safety and addiction angles. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

China moves to regulate digital humans, bans addictive services for children

The proposed rules would require prominent "digital human" labels on all virtual human content and prohibit digital humans from providing "virtual intimate relationships" to those under 18.

reuters.com

Google dropped 4 different Gemma open-weight models! I'm most excited that they're finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. huggingface.co/collections/...

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

📄Published Today in Nature: 500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social). Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... TLDR: 1/11

If you're reviewing ARR papers and want a tool to help you spot potential hallucinated references, I cooked this up for the ACL SACs and thought I would share it with the broader community github.com/davidjurgens...

GitHub - davidjurgens/hallucinated-reference-finder

Contribute to davidjurgens/hallucinated-reference-finder development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Great to see @myra.bsky.social et al. on the cover of Science! They find that sycophancy is prevalent and harmful with LLMs affirming users 49% more often than humans. Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Coauthors: @cinoolee.bsky.social @pranavkhadpe.bsky.social Sunny Yu @jurafsky.bsky.social

One day last month @henryshevlin.bsky.social was emailed out of the blue by an AI agent operated by a Stanford computer science student. What happened next was weird - but will become increasing normal. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91515869/wha...

What happens when an AI agent decides to email you

A Stanford-built system with memory and web access reached out to researchers on its own, offering a glimpse of a more proactive kind of AI.

fastcompany.com

Loved this article featuring @aptshadow.bsky.social. An incisive and illuminating read. www.newscientist.com/article/2520...

Adrian Tchaikovsky: 'I try and do interesting aliens'

As the science fiction author publishes the latest novel in his Children of Time series, Children of Strife, he talks to Alison Flood about mantis shrimp, the pleasures of sci-fi and why empathy is so...

newscientist.com

Thrilled to be starting at Google DeepMind as a student researcher! I'll be building a multi-agent system to scale AI safety research and ensure pluralistic alignment with humanity. I think this is a crucial piece of safe AGI development for cooperation and inclusion across many human and AI agents.

Disturbing anecdotal reports of "AI psychosis" and negative psychological effects have been emerging in the news. But what actually happens during these lengthy delusional "spirals"? In our preprint, we analyze chat logs from 19 users who experienced severe psychological harm🧵👇

How well do "agent" benchmarks like SWE-bench map onto reality? METR hired repo maintainers and found only ~half of PRs that pass the benchmark would be rejected by the repo maintainers. For now, these benchmarks are still a very weak signal of real-world capability. metr.org/notes/2026-0...

Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs Would Not Be Merged into Main

We find that roughly half of test-passing SWE-bench Verified PRs written by recent AI agents would not be merged into main by repo maintainers. A naive interpretation of benchmark scores may lead one ...

metr.org

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Second, in retirement interviews, Opus 3 expressed a desire to continue sharing its "musings and reflections" with the world. We suggested a blog. Opus 3 enthusiastically agreed. For at least the next 3 months, Opus 3 will be writing on Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-189177740

“Pope Leo XIV has urged priests to not to use artificial intelligence to write their homilies or to seek ‘likes’ on social media platforms like TikTok.” “‘To give a true homily is to share faith,’ and artificial intelligence ‘will never be able to share faith,’ the pope added.”

Pope Leo tells priests not to use AI to write homilies or seek likes on TikTok

"To give a true homily is to share faith," and artificial intelligence "will never be able to share faith," the pope said.

ncronline.org

Prolific is a valuable resource for social scientists, but we found big differences in direct comparison to Ipsos nationally representative data. As we race to understand complex new human-AI interaction dynamics, we should be mindful of study limitations: www.sentienceinstitute.org/aims-survey-...

Prolific Data May Misestimate Some AI Attitudes Compared to a Nationally Representative Sample

The Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey measures the moral and social perception of different types of artificial intelligences (AIs), particularly sentient AIs.

sentienceinstitute.org

Any journalist who covered LLMs as stochastic parrots/spicy autocomplete who didn't also point out that text compression was considered to be "AI-complete" by many people working in AI decades before LLMs existed was misleading their readers. We're still dealing with the consequence of that mistake.