Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Really enjoyed this conversation with @mikealbertus.bsky.social about my paper on the limits of AI for authoritarian control. Grateful to Mike for the thoughtful questions and for featuring the work. Check out Mike's Substack if you haven't! 030
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 13/05/2026New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers. 25879450
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 09/03/2026I wrote about my experience tinkering with AI for social science research: open.substack.com/pub/ey211/p/...open.substack.comTinkering with AI for social science researchI spent two weekends figuring out how much I can integrate AI in my own research. 140
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 19/02/2026New paper out at AJPS: "The limits of AI for authoritarian control." The more repression there is, the less information exists in AI's training data, and the worse the AI performs. 0162
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 17/02/2026We've updated the localLLM package on CRAN (cran.r-project.org/package=loca...). It allows you to run LLMs locally and natively in R. Everything is reproducible. And it's free. Some functionalities on reproducibility and validation🧵👇cran.r-project.orglocalLLM: Running Local LLMs with 'llama.cpp' BackendProvides R bindings to the 'llama.cpp' library for running large language models. The package uses a lightweight architecture where the C++ backend library is downloaded at runtime rather than bundled... 143
Reposted by Eddie YangAdam Scharpf @ascharpf.bsky.social · 16/02/2026Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf 1417183
Reposted by Eddie YangDaniel de Kadt @dandekadt.bsky.social · 21/12/2025So, randomization is not a *sufficient* condition for good research. Far from it. The best experimental social science being done is that work where either the theory or the operationalization (or both) are the emphasis. Randomization is "easy" - the challenge is what you randomize and why. 3223
Reposted by Eddie YangMelissa Sands @msands.bsky.social · 11/12/2025Can Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extract features of urban neighborhoods from street-view images? New with Paige Bollen (OSU) and @joehigton.bsky.social (NYU): Sometimes, but the models better recover national assessments that local ones, even w/additional prompting (which can make things worse!) 1215
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 20/10/2025New paper: LLMs are increasingly used to label data in political science. But how reliable are these annotations, and what are the consequences for scientific findings? What are best practices? Some new findings from a large empirical evaluation. Paper: eddieyang.net/research/llm_annotation.pdf 14014
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 19/06/2025Great analogy to connect AI to many canonical political science questions. Political behavior has led the way in studying AI. Excited to see institutions catch up😀 193
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 08/05/2025If no resource constraint, what open-weight LLM would you use in your research (for data labeling, coding etc.)? 000
Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 18/03/2025Awesome work! Love to see different approaches to this problem. 000
