I just landed in Burlington for @ic2s2.bsky.social. Looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference. I'm giving a talk about large reasoning models tomorrow and Duhui Lee is presenting some of our new work on conspiracy theories and visual media on Thursday #IC2S2

We have re-opened our search for a 3-year AI-research postdoc at NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics!! The position starts this **September 1st** (or as soon as possible thereafter) and is in person at NYU. If necessary, we will also consider a 1/1/27 start. 1/3

This is quite the finding for a device thats just a plagiarism machine, or whatever we are calling it this week. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments - Nature

Large language models can be used to estimate the results of social science experiments about as accurately as a group of human forecasters—even for experiments published after the...

nature.com

Ranjit Lall, @thomasdavidson.bsky.social & Felix Hagemeister confirm the boosting influence of public health shocks on right-wing populism using data from France, Great Britain and the Netherlands: doi.org/10.1177/0010...

📢 Call for Reviewers: WOAH @ #EMNLP2026 WOAH is looking for reviewers to help evaluate submissions for our 10th edition at EMNLP 2026. Interested in serving as a reviewer? 🔗 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Thank you for helping us make #WOAH2026 a success! #NLP #AI #OnlineSafety

WOAH 2026 - Reviewer Sign-Up

WOAH 2026 will take place at EMNLP in Budapest on 29 November, 2026. The deadline for paper submission will be June 26, 2026. We intend to use the SoftConf platform, and as in previous years, we wi...

docs.google.com

Our paper on the pandemic and populism is online in Comparative Political Studies. We find that local COVID-19 transmission increased support for right-wing populists in Europe, and triangulate our findings across data from social media, elections, and surveys.

This is a fairly large (EUR 29M) initiative at Universität des Saarlandes around using data and computational methods to understand and support societal tranformations. As part of this initiative, *five* professorships will be created. Talk to me about details.

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

A new paper in Nature finds that engagement-based algorithms on social media amplifies intergroup, moralized and emotional (IME) information + toxic content relative to reverse-chronological feeds, with the largest increases in moral outrage and political content. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper on the pandemic and populism is online in Comparative Political Studies. We find that local COVID-19 transmission increased support for right-wing populists in Europe, and triangulate our findings across data from social media, elections, and surveys.

Three things said about AI and social science: it's a topic to study, a thing to critique, a tool to use. My new Daedalus essay argues these aren't three conversations; they're one. A 🧵 on "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool." www.amacad.org/publication/...

Another angle I have been thinking about is what this means for computational sociology (and CSS more broadly) as a field. Is all social science becoming CSS? Do all social scientists now need to understand word embeddings, etc? When is AI a computational method, and when is it something else?

Thomas Davidson@thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Lots of provocations here, looking forward to reading. Its a brave new world for social science! I'm optimisic about automating the "boring parts" of research, but pessimistic about implications of the deluge of slop (its bad enough already). Two threads I find interesting re agentic research:

Lots of provocations here, looking forward to reading. Its a brave new world for social science! I'm optimisic about automating the "boring parts" of research, but pessimistic about implications of the deluge of slop (its bad enough already). Two threads I find interesting re agentic research:

Per Engzell@pengzell.bsky.social · 3mo 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...

📣 SKAT virtual event tomorrow! Are you a sociologist interested in careers in the tech industry? Come join our panel of experts who can chat about hiring and the industry writ large.

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

I’m #hiring a PhD Student in Computational Social Science / Agentic Large Language Models. Know anyone who might be interested? www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/44...

🚨 Update: WOAH Mentorship @ #EMNLP2026 🚨 Deadline extended to April 17! 📅 Still time to apply as mentor or mentee and develop your WOAH submission with expert guidance 💡 📝 Mentor: forms.gle/XaK8KBFomaWZ... 📝 Mentee: forms.gle/AC5akVcdzsCv... Join us! 🌍 #NLP #WOAH

This blog by @maartengr.bsky.social has some awesome visualizations showing the architecture and components of multimodal models. This will be a great pedagogical resource, up there with Christopher Olah's blogs and 3Brown1Blue's videos.

Gus@gusthema.bsky.social · 4mo ago

If you want to understand more about the internals of Gemma 4 and how the model is structured, this visual guide is a perfect start: newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-g...

📄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

3-year contract for a Phd position in Sociology on the discourse of/about AI, at l'Institut polytechnique de Paris.

Samuel Coavoux@scoavoux.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Join us at @crestsociology.bsky.social : call for a PhD grant in computational sociology/CSS on the media framing of AI www.css.cnrs.fr/framing-ai-r... w/ @eollion.bsky.social. Deadline for application is May 15th

It appears this was due to badly configured repetition_penalty parameter in transformers. Essentially, if you penalize repetition then the model optimizes by regurgitating random tokens. The responses are now coherent after removing this - but painfully slow.

Thomas Davidson@thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Question for AI Bsky, has anyone managed to get useful reasoning traces from open-weights models? Here is some typical output I got from Qwen 3.5 on a vision task. It starts out reasonable but descends into gibberish (neuralese?) @lauraknelson.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @cbarrie.bsky.social

Question for AI Bsky, has anyone managed to get useful reasoning traces from open-weights models? Here is some typical output I got from Qwen 3.5 on a vision task. It starts out reasonable but descends into gibberish (neuralese?) @lauraknelson.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @cbarrie.bsky.social

Excited to be in Toronto to share my latest research in the UTM sociology speaker series and conduct a graduate student masterclass this afternoon! www.sociology.utoronto.ca/events/utm-s...

WOAH is coming back for its 10th edition at EMNLP 2026 in Budapest! 🎊 For this important anniversary, we invite authors to critically reflect on our achievements as a community and adjust the aim going forward. Stay tuned, more updates coming soon! #EMNLP2026 #WOAH2026 #NLProc

AI-generated summaries of history led to more liberal opinions compared to Wikipedia, while summaries by chatbots prompted to use a conservative framing produced more conservative opinions—but primarily among conservative readers. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/1moU50YpOHN

Call for Submissions: AI for Social Science Methodology (Yale) • Keynote: @nachristakis.bsky.social • Panel with editors of leading journals on publishing AI research • Mentoring roundtables for early-career scholars • Generous travel support Discussion-driven, high-quality research.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

Great write-up on our recent studies: “Back in the day, if you wanted to know what the Seattle General Strike was, you’d grab an encyclopedia or ... check Wikipedia,” Karell said. “Now, you just ask ChatGPT... Increasingly, the information we rely on is being packaged by tools built by companies.”

Yale ISPS@ispsyale.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New study: AI Tools Like ChatGPT Make Learning Easier — and More Persuasive bit.ly/4cmVUxO @thomasdavidson.bsky.social

Our new paper is out today in @pnasnexus.org with colleagues at Yale (@matthewshu.com, Danny Karell, @keitarookura.bsky.social) We wanted to understand how using AI-generated summaries to learn about history influenced attitudes compared to existing resources like Wikipedia. 1/4

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and identify new research partners across academic fields? Apply to one of the 2026 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (described in yellow in the attached map) here: sicss.io/locations