iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It's possible for Jev/Laya/Decision Models to be not that big a deal as tech and massive as a new paradigm. Here's why I'm really excited from an NLP history perspective (thread)

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My favorite emails I've gotten ever starting this new job are from The Center for Dairy Research recruiting participants for consumer panels and studies. So far I have gotten invites for taste-testing dairy beverages and queso dip.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

now that a substantial proportion of my time is spent teachng, i am so grateful for people who make their lecture slides public so mine will be public too! lucy3.github.io/cs769-fall26...

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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

UCSD Psychology is hiring!! We’re seeking a new assistant professor colleague who studies high-level human cognition, broadly construed. Please share and/or apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04646

apol-recruit.ucsd.edu

Assistant Professor in High-level Human Cognition

University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

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Pause AI in BC Schools @aicaution.ca · 10/09/2026

The data from this OECD PISA report is damning. "students who do not use AI outperform those who do, ... equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers." www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

Graph showing students who never use AI scoring 505 on a "draft texts for writing assignments" task. As students use AI more, the score goes down, until students who use it daily score 480.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Starting off my first lecture later this week as a prof with a little history of NLP! Warren Weaver (known for writing a memorandum that ignited machine translation in 1949, before "artificial intelligence" was even coined as a term) did his BS and PhD at UW-Madison 🦡🧀

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I just found out that my work on english language arts books taught in schools was discussed in this podcast! open.spotify.com/episode/6zdE...

open.spotify.com

5 Fascinating Stats About Modern Reading Habits, with Laura McGrath

Book Riot - The Podcast · Episode

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Spent a good amount of this summer digging through a 20+ person team of teachers' free-text annotations, learning what "scaffolding" and "push for rigor" means, and iterating on this pipeline. We find that AI tutors, by default, frequently over-scaffold and rarely push for rigor.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I used to joke that going to Stanford for college w/ palm trees and manicured landscapes was like being on vacation with exams -- summers at UW-Madison have a similar feel. Some evenings are so pretty that these ducks must be paid actors to decorate these lakes also the ice cream is very creamy

ducks and a dock and a sunset on lake mendota

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Shahan Ali Memon @shahanmemon.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Are you on academic job market for #Postdoc or #TT Assistant/Assoc. Prof/Lecturer/ #AP /Research Scholar/ #fellowship jobs for 2026-2027 in #CS/ #SocSci/ #InfoSci/ Management Science/ #Psych & similar? Like last year, I am maintaining a list (so far ~200 positions) docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com

2026-2027 Postdoc/TT/Research Scientist Positions in Information/CS/Social Science + Related Fields

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.org · 30/07/2026

New issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity: “The Breath of the Author” — The palpable presence of someone else’s mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

newsletter.dancohen.org

The Breath of the Author

The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text

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Data & Society @datasociety.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

📣 New! As AI agents are increasing used for daily tasks, their relative autonomy challenges traditional means of human oversight. Samir Passi & Ranjit Singh show why oversight can't rest on individual users alone, w specific recommendations for builders and deployers. datasociety.net/research-lib...

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Alexandra Olteanu @aolteanu.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Wrote a brief reflection on poor conceptualizations in AI work and why they matter, something I believe is so startlingly neglected. TL;DR - Poor conceptual foundations can severely undermine the credibility and reliability of knowledge claims.

rigor-in-ai.leaflet.pub

Back-to-basics: on poor conceptualizations in AI work

TL;DR — Poor conceptual foundations can severely undermine the credibility and reliability of knowledge claims. (And, no, your metric is not your construct.)

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I have two projects involving Chinese speakers this year, and so I'm saying "I'm going to ask my mom" in project meetings more often than usual

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Looking for two emergency reviewers for ACL ARR May, one paper is on educational question generation and one is on historical text!

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

👨‍🎨 update slai = social language and ai w = wisconsin

an image of a sticker showing a badger with red and white hat hugging a jar of hazelnut spread branded as "slai"

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Screenshot of paper abstract that reads:

AI FICTION IN THE WILD Neel Gupta Maria Antoniak Melanie Walsh

Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (Zhao et al.), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation—including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call infinite story demanders, who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer, who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.

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Waxy.org @waxy.org · 24/06/2026

The Pudding's early history of U.S. restaurant dining: don't miss the interactive map of 5,000 historical menus pulled from the NYPL's Buttolph collection pudding.cool/2026/06/m...

pudding.cool

A History of Menus is a Menu of History

What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

👨‍🎨 update on initial brainstorm sketch to actual sketch:

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

me: "please draw a wisconsin badger hugging a jar of hazelnut spread except instead of the logo being nutella because it's trademarked it is the logo of my new research group" human 👨‍🎨:

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

New work from my lab! @teagrjohnson.bsky.social built a 12-dimensional narrative framework, annotated Dolma (no small feat given its extreme diversity), and analyzed narrative features across pretraining subsections. Highlight: pretraining data space displays strong narrative organization!

Figure 6: UMAP reduction of SBERT embeddings for 20,000 randomly sampled NARRADOLMA documents, colored by PC1 score (interiority). Labels are based on manual examination. Overlays for all three PCs appear in Fig. A5.

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Fabien Accominotti @faccominotti.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

UW-Madison Sociology is hiring! We're inviting applications for an assistant professor position in the fields of demography, soc of population, and health, to begin August 2027. Come join @uwsoc.bsky.social and the great @cdeuw.bsky.social! Apply here: jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

jobs.wisc.edu

Assistant Professor of Sociology - Madison, Wisconsin, United States

Current Employees: If you are currently employed at any of the Universities of Wisconsin, log in to Workday to apply through the internal application process.Job Category:FacultyEmployment Type:Regula...

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

tfw the articles ai retrieves are also ai-generated

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

tfw ur paper clicking is not human enough

a screenshot of "your ip address has been blocked please contact dl-support@acm.org"

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Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

🚨New preprint!🚨 arxiv.org/abs/2606.03095 In a randomized field experiment in a 300-level machine learning course, teaching assistants received AI-assisted feedback drafts after grading student submissions. Did AI help them provide more feedback when feedback was optional? A thread 🧵

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Michael Zimmer @michaelzimmer.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/m...

nytimes.com

A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

oh my goodness i have not walked my cat in weeks

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 27/05/2026

LLMs could never.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

growing up as the kid who was "a joy to have in class" really has escalated to the point where i will soon be in class forever

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

www.forbes.com/sites/michae... other tidbits: - plans to hire 50 new faculty, and many will have joint appointments w/ other departments - university will also provide additional $50+ million annually

forbes.com

University Of Wisconsin Receives $100 Million For Its New AI College

The University of Wisconsin–Madison has received $100 million in gift commitments for its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, set to launch this July.

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Reposted by Lucy Li

Joachim Baumann @joachimbaumann.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Can you boost your AI review scores by asking an LLM to rewrite your paper? Yes! We call it paper laundering Our @icmlconf.bsky.social spotlight paper argues current AI reviewers aren't ready to automate peer review, and outlines what a science of peer review automation should look like 🧵👇 #ICML2026

First page of the ICML 2026 spotlight paper "Stop Automating Peer Review Without Rigorous Evaluation" by Joachim Baumann, Jiaxin Pei, Sanmi Koyejo, and Dirk Hovy (Stanford University and Bocconi University). The abstract argues that today's AI systems should not be used to produce paper reviews, grounded in two empirical findings: a "hivemind effect" where AI reviewers show excessive agreement and reduce perspective diversity, and "paper laundering," where prompting an LLM to rewrite a paper trivially increases AI reviewer scores through stylistic changes rather than scientific improvements. The paper calls for a science of peer review automation rather than wholesale deployment of general-purpose LLMs.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Looking for a emergency reviewer for a paper related to human-AI interaction/cooperation for ACL ARR (we've been iterating on getting replacement reviewers for this paper for awhile now and fingers crossed) -- if you're able to help me out with this, lmk. Happy to return the favor in the future.

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Internet Archive @archive.org · 23/04/2026

🧵 We tend to think the internet is permanent, but VANISHING CULTURE—the new 📚 from Internet Archive—starts with a simple reality: our digital record is far more fragile than we think 🕳️ 📖 Read for free: archive.org/details/vani... 🛒 Purchase in print: www.betterworldbooks.com/product/deta... ⬇️

Book cover titled “Vanishing Culture” on a teal background. Pixel-art style graphics show a VHS tape, open book, film reel, chain link, and vinyl record dissolving into digital fragments. At the bottom, a cursor icon points to the word “SAVE,” alongside an archive-style building icon, evoking digital preservation.

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

What are the worst ethical disasters in NLP history? (I'm teaching "ethics of NLP" tomorrow and history is good for teaching this topic.) Most are data breaches/releases (AOL search logs, OKCupid profiles, Finnish therapy records...) but what others? I'll put some other examples in thread --> 1/n

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

going through my wisconsin email inbox and it is just like, tornado on tuesday, tornado on friday, faculty meeting next week

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology. The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome. Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷

doingaidifferently.org

Doing AI Differently | Culture × AI Workshop

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I remember someone once curated a collection of lab manuals / onboarding docs to guide people who are making their own. Pointers to this?? Or pointers to your own research group's docs? Do your students use/maintain the docs?

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

there is nothing more satisfying than struggling to articulate some problem or concept and finding a pre-2020s paper from another field that does it very well

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Jenna Russell @jennarussell.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Would you realize if the book you were reading was AI? What if it was humanized to remove AI-speak? We find that even without using stylistic cues (e.g., word choice or sentence structure) narrative choices alone give AI fiction away!

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Francesco Salvi @frasalvi.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

🛍️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

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

I feel like I should be seeing this paper cited more often by CSS folks!!!

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

A piece co-authored by an old friend (Divya Saini, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital) www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Your Chatbot Isn’t a Therapist

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

This is super interesting to read because I was very concerned about the water and AI thing so I went to my one scientist friend who literally worked on water reg/quality/usage and asked her about AI, data centers, water etc. She was far more concerned with agriculture abuses than AI.

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Alexander Hoyle @alexanderhoyle.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I wrote a blog post on my experience using AI for slide generation Basic idea: write your lecture notes first, then prompt the LLM to produce corresponding slides in reveal.js (h/t @chenhaotan.bsky.social). I'm picky about my slides but was happy with the results! alexanderhoyle.com/posts/ai-sli...

A slide showing that the posterior is proportional to the likelihood times the prior

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Reposted by Lucy Li

UC Berkeley School of Information @berkeleyischool.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Influencers are increasingly finding deepfaked videos of themselves online advertising services they never used. "Anybody can create an avatar of you, and then anybody can monetize that,” said Prof. Hany Farid to @rollingstone.com.

rollingstone.com

'It's Personality Theft': How Creators Are Fighting Back Against AI Deepfakes

As artificial intelligence becomes more accessible, creators are finding replicas of themselves promoting companies they've never even heard of.

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