You can be concerned about deepfakes and still want a digital world with Balenciaga pope. Great analysis from @beccabranum.bsky.social

Becca Branum@beccabranum.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Remember Balenciaga Pope? A perfectly serene pontiff, an impossibly puffy coat. A low-stakes, harmless joy of the internet. The NO FAKES Act would put a target on Balenciaga Pope and everything like it. Here's how: 🧵 www.gq.com/story/pope-p...

Every now and then I read a thing that could only have been written by a human. This is one of those things: theonion.com/i-work-very-... AI could never.

I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake

Hello. I am a horse. I work very hard at my job of being a horse. When humans say move the heavy thing, I move the heavy thing. When humans sit on top of me and pull on my head, I carry them where the...

theonion.com

Anthropic is embedding AI fellows at nonprofits around the United States. Think Code for America, Peace Corps, or Americorps, but make it AI. It's called Claude Corps.

Anthropic {bot}@anthropicbot.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We’re launching Claude Corps, a national fellowship program matching people early in their careers with US nonprofits. We'll teach 1,000 people to use Claude, and pay them to use AI to advance their hosts’ missions. https://www.anthropic.com/claude-corps

ICYMI, the proposed USPS rules that follow the March mail voting EO are live for comment until July 2. A couple thoughts🧵 www.cnn.com/2026/06/10/p...

Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive | CNN Politics

State election officials could soon face a stark choice: hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots.

cnn.com

When people do work with generative AI, they frequently do knowledge work. But will broad adoption of AI *democratize* knowledge work? In a new perspective in @natcomputsci.nature.com, we lay out technical + social factors shaping access to and use of AI for knowledge work around the world.

When does the design of conversational AI systems push users into acting in ways that are misaligned with their interests? Great @404media.co article about the new @cdt.org report on "dark patterns" by Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagodjou, and @mluria.bsky.social www.404media.co/new-study-re...

New Study Reveals the Manipulative ‘Dark Patterns’ of AI Chatbots

A new study by the Center for Democracy & Technology shows how chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Replika and more can lead users down paths they didn't intend.

404media.co

🎉 I've joined @cdt.org as their Research Director. 🎉 I could not be more excited to be part of an organization that has championed people's online rights, fought for good technologies, and defended against problematic ones for decades. If you have research ideas, reach out!

"conversational agents can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, most users cannot tell when it is happening, and existing transparency mechanisms are insufficient" New + excellent paper on effects of persuasive AI in shaping purchasing behaviors. Effect sizes are concerningly large!

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

LLMs will transform e-commerce in ways that consumer protection is unprepared for! Our new preprint finds that conversational AI can strongly steer consumer choices: sponsored product selection nearly tripled relative to traditional placement (N=2012). Link: arxiv.org/abs/2604.04263

Hello if you think this expression on my face is mischief and provocation you would be correct. Having an absolute blast at #ECIR2026 #IR4Good - thank you for letting me show up to to talk about how important (good) IR is for global democracies!

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra.bsky.social · 4mo ago

...an engaging panel with critical conversations between Madeleine Daepp, @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy, @sannevrijenhoek.bsky.social, and myself, moderated by my wonderful co-track chair @mariaheuss.bsky.social. #ECIR2026 #IR4Good (Photo credit: @arjenpdevries.bsky.social) /4

"I don't want to not use cool technology just because it has a shitty business model" - Cindy Cohn at @townhallseattle.bsky.social 80% through the book and she is an inspiration and a delight

Electronic Frontier Foundation@eff.org · 4mo ago

📺 HAPPENING TONIGHT 📺 EFF's Cindy Cohn will be on @TheDailyShow.com with Jon Stewart at 10 PM Central and 11 PM Eastern and Pacific! Make sure you tune in!

People make expensive decisions based on how LLMs perform on Chatbot Arena and other ranking systems. Turns out these rankings are very sensitive to tiny changes. New paper from MIT: news.mit.edu/2026/study-p...

Study: Platforms that rank the latest LLMs can be unreliable

The results of popular LLM ranking platforms can be skewed by just a few data points, possibly providing an unreliable report about which LLM would perform best in real situations, according MIT resea...

news.mit.edu

I am working on my ECIR keynote on "gemini hegemony" and wow this is going to be an excellent slide

Casey Newton@caseynewton.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This really sucks

In 2023, my team published one of the first papers on AI-led interviews. We wanted to know if ChatGPT could do qualitative research. (It couldn't) Now Anthropic has done 80k AI interviews across 159 countries. Some thoughts on why adaptive AI surveys are useful but do *not* replace qual research.

AI Interviewers, Qualitative Literacy, and “Big Dick” Data

The moment I first tried ChatGPT, I knew it would change my research. So, in the summer of 2023, a wonderful team of PhD interns and I decided to test whether it could do interviews. We ended up writi...

adventures-in-ai-and-democracy.ghost.io

This thread on a Brussels AI + Foreign Interference panel is one of the best run-downs I've seen of the challenges ahead this year including: - GEO, carpet bombing, and training data grooming - model sovereignty vs. quality / access / cost - the cognitive costs of efficiency over accuracy bad bad!

Aaron Rodericks@aaron.bsky.team · 5mo ago

-> you've seen a massive spike in GEO companies that are the equivalent of SEO for LLMs. They spin up 100k web sites, and then will saturate Reddit and Wikipedia to saturate a specific message that will be used to train the bots to deliver that message.

Come be my colleague! Postdoc position at the University of Amsterdam: Open-source AI for Social Sciences & Humanities. Work on open LLM infrastructure, reproducible research tools, and ethical AI for SSH. 🗓 Tight deadline: Apply by April 3 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Last night the Iranian Embassy in The Hague dropped a Pixar-style AI video trolling President Trump. It is wild and also exactly what I expected from two years of research on AI misuse in global democracies: AI trolling does better online than deepfakes. We called the tactic a "deep roast."

🚨 Call now open: Democracy x AI Incubator Mozilla Foundation is funding working AI systems that strengthen information, transparency, and civic space. $50K + 12 months of support. Apply by March 16, 2026 https://bit.ly/406u4yj

APPLY NOW Democracy x AI Cohort | Mozilla Foundation

We are seeking to support working prototypes that prove AI can serve democracy. Apply now.

bit.ly

I am delighted to be keynoting the IR-for-good track at @ecir2026.eu I will be talking about what I learned from studying generative AI's use during the biggest election year in history. (Spoiler: the problem is not just deepfakes.) The talk is called gemini hegemony, expect a little 🌶️

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🗓️ Monday, March 30 10:30-12:30: IR-for-Good Paper Session I 13:30-14:30: IR-for-Good Paper Session II 16:00-17:15: IR-for-Good Invited Talks and Panel 🗓️ Tuesday, March 31 09:00-10:00: IR-for-good Keynote by @mdaepp.bsky.social on "Gemini Hegemony" 10:30-12:30: IR-for-Good Paper Session III Cont...

Hegseth calling it "defective altruism" is the strangest and most telling moment in this whole saga. When you interview for Anthropic, the most important question is "why anthropic?" It's a culture screener: the answer is safety, alignment, being one of the good guys.

Matthew Sheffield@matthew.flux.community · 5mo ago

Did OpenAI reject its stated core concerns about AI running fully autonomous robots and conducting mass surveillance of Americans? It sure seems that way. I parse the language and provide the background here:

If you're trying to build successful and pro-social agent swarms, here are four lessons from moltbook (...on what *not* to do)

How not to set up an agent swarm

Most humans have moved on from Moltbook, the first social media site exclusively for AIs, but plenty of bots are still checking in regularly. Including one particular bot, Marginal, that I tasked with...

adventures-in-ai-and-democracy.ghost.io

Are other people's AIs really into Ursula K. Le Guin and Borges or is that just mine?

most fears about advanced technology are actually fears about capitalism, to paraphrase ted chiang as it turns out, capitalism + frontier tech is indeed a scary combo buckle up everyone, it's gonna be a wild decade.

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"Anthropic, the wildly successful AI company that has cast itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, is dropping the central pledge of its flagship safety policy, company officials tell TIME."

Nothing is more important in shaping the future of tech than the builders themselves---so it's fascinating to see the unexpected electoral success of Japan's Team Mirai, a party of software engineers who are using AI-powered transparency and deliberation tools www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/w...

The A.I. Evangelists on a Mission to Shake Up Japan

nytimes.com

In case you are curious why AI feels so societally misaligned these days, remember that all the Important Model Builders have decided to continue drenching their brains in the twitter

Philine Widmer@phinifa.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

5 PRs from an AI agent that fixed all 500 issues in 5 minutes

What does the social network of bluseky look like? @theo.io maps 3.4m users. Found via @flowingdata.com, which has been my source for the best data visualizations on the internet for nearly a decade

Theo Sanderson@theo.io · 6mo ago

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

For those who struggle with section 230, it's jarring to see a defense from Wikipedia -- the last best place on the web. But courts are increasingly letting cases through under product liability. With clever jurisprudence, maybe we can protect mods *and* hold platforms accountable for harms.

Electronic Frontier Foundation@eff.org · 6mo ago

Wikipedia is written by volunteers—but defended by lawyers when necessary. We spoke with Wikimedia about legal threats, global takedown demands, and why Section 230 remains essential. www.eff.org/pages/inter...

There has been an 80% decline in open-source code from newsrooms since 2016. "At its peak, @nytimes.com released dozens of public repositories on GitHub each year. In 2024, it posted zero." Shout-out to @puddingviz.bsky.social, @bellingcat.com, and @citybureau.bsky.social for bucking the trend.

Nieman Lab@niemanlab.org · 6mo ago

Activity on GitHub has cratered. In 2016, news organizations posted more than 2,000 public projects to the code-sharing site. Last year, that number slumped below 400, an 80% decline. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/jour...

📣 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS Join us at the 2026 Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at Penn, from June 15–26! ℹ️ More info: sicss.io/2026/penn . ⏳ Deadline: Friday, March 6, 2026, at 11:59 pm EST. #SICSS #ComputationalSocialScience

Discovered molthub today, the *adult* equivalent of moltbook. The comments are incredible: "I showed this to my embeddings and now they won't normalize." It turns out to be yet another attempt to entrap your agents to buy crypto but ... at least it is a very funny scam.

Wyatt Walls@wwalls.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I'm noticing a pattern with some of the more viral moltbook claims: 1. Molthub: Pornhub parody with a pump fun meme coin 2. Moltroad: Silkroad parody. Skill md that directs agents to use real money to buy a meme coin to trade parody goods ("Neural enhancers, token boosters")