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Ronald E. Robertson

@rer.bsky.social
430 followers 327 following 12 posts

Research scientist at the Stanford Tech Impact and Policy Center and co-editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.

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Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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dan bateyko @dbateyko.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Local law still formally mandates racial segregation. In 2026. We built the largest dataset of local laws and used LLMs to search for discriminatory provisions across the nation. What we found should not still be on the books. hai.stanford.edu/policy/makin...
hai.stanford.edu
Making Local Law Legible: LLM-Assisted Detection of Discrimination | Stanford HAI
This brief demonstrates the potential of LLM-assisted review to accelerate legal reform.
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Stanford Tech Impact and Policy Center @techimpactpolicy.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The Journal of Online Trust and Safety is thrilled to release its new special issue: Digital Intersectionality and Marginalization in the Majority World. 🌏 🔗 tsjournal.org/index.php/jo... #JOTS #TrustAndSafety #MajorityWorld #GlobalSouth
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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Just want to say that these lunatics accused me of being a *secret CIA agent* while DataRepublican is literally working for the govt while pretending to be an ordinary influencers, & receiving leaked docs. The Trump admin is running ops, as they say, but for real. Every accusation is a confession.
Konstantin Toropin
@KToropin
G...
The Pentagon confirms -
"Ms. Pounds serves at the Department of War as a Special Government
Employee."
AF. AF Post •
@AFpost • Aug 21
Jennica Pounds, aka Data Republican, a Department of War employee, alleges that Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers is attempting to "entrap" Pounds by providing her with information to "leak" under the guise of offering her a
"scoop."
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J. Nathan Matias @natematias.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Is AI convincing seniors to stop taking their meds? Worrying deep dive by Cody Sumter, who monitored a slopiverse of 150 medical advice YouTube channels for months as they put out daily videos of dangerous advice, with millions of views. cc @mantzarlis.com codysumter.substack.com/p/this-is-me...
codysumter.substack.com
This is Medical Advice*
The AI slop doctors of YouTube, and the prompts instructing them to lie
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Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 05/08/2026
Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24. @noupside.bsky.social and @rer.bsky.social explore why it matters that the encyclopedia hasn’t edited itself or processed edits from humans in more than 3 months. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/grok...
lawfaremedia.org
Grokipedia Stopped Reviewing Edits in April. It Didn’t Tell Anyone.
A halt in Grokipedia’s edit pipeline offers a case study in how an AI-generated reference system governs its own content.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Tulane's Muira McCammon documented how Google turned off reviews for 90+ ICE detention facilities, erasing accounts of conditions inside. Google says disabling ICE facility reviews was "unrelated to a government request." But McCammon argues the effect is the same: dissent rendered invisible.
buff.ly
As Google Scrubs ICE Detention Reviews, Platform Power Serves State Interests
Google’s content moderation choices threaten to render accounts of treatment inside federal detention centers invisible, writes Muira McCammon.
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David Lazer @davidlazer.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
(feel free to complain to me to) And for the #IC2S2 crowd, I'll also point to the work of the Coalition of Independent Technology Research in helping protect CSS research & researchers, and encourage you to join the organization. independenttechresearch.org
independenttechresearch.org
Home - Coalition for Independent Technology Research
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Matt DeVerna @matthewdeverna.com · 08/07/2026
One of the first things I learned as a PhD student was that you *need* a website. I built a template site that uses Claude Code to easily design and maintain your personal site—hosted free on GitHub. Clone it, then run the "/setup-site" skill in Claude Code and Claude walks you through set up.
github.com
GitHub - mr-devs/cc-academic-website: Academic website template + Claude Code assisted development.
Academic website template + Claude Code assisted development. - mr-devs/cc-academic-website
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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Today we beat Stephen Miller’s lawsuit mill in court! For 3 years I’ve been a defendant in a case filed by America First Legal on behalf of Gateway Pundit & a random antivaxxer we’d never heard of until she sued us. The plaintiffs claimed we “censored” them. It was a lie. They just lost.
Case 3:23-cv-00571-TAD-KDM
Document 219
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Filed 07/01/26 Page 1 of 23 PagelD #:
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT WESTERN DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA
MONROE DIVISION
JILL HINES ET AL
VERSUS
ALEX STAMOS ET AL
CASE NO. 3:23-CV-00571
JUDGE TERRY A. DOUGHTY
MAG. JUDGE KAYLA D.
MCCLUSKY
MEMORANDUM RULING
Before the Court is a Renewed Joint Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Subject
Matter and Personal Jurisdiction [Doc. No. 191] filed by Defendants, Alex Stamos,
Renée DiResta, the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, the
Leland Stanford Junior University, Kate Starbird, Graphika, Camille François, the
Atlantic Council, and Graham Brookie (collectively, "Defendants"). Plaintiffs, Jill Hines ("Hines") and Jim Hoft ("Hoft") (collectively, "Plaintiffs"), filed an Opposition
[Doc. No. 207]. Defendants then filed a Reply [Doc. No. 209].
For the reasons set forth, Defendants' Motion is GRANTED.
I. BACKGROUND
This case is before the Court on limited remand to determine jurisdiction.
Hines v. Stamos, 111 F.4th 551 (5th Cir. 2024); see also [Doc. No. 112]. On May 2,
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 24/06/2026
This may *begin* to be true in 2026, but it really was not true 2020-25, in what I would call the “stochastic parrot” era of AI critique And part of the reason I mostly don’t pay attention to critics now is that there has been so little honest grappling with the spectacular wrongness of that era +
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Hendrik Mans @hmans.dev · 28/05/2026
Reminder that OSS developers are always, with no exception, free to do whatever they want with their work, including sabotaging their own reputation/career
github.com
Question: intent of JqwikExecutor.printMessageForCodingAgents() — visible to agents, invisible to humans (1.10.0) · Issue #708 · jqwik-team/jqwik
Hello jqwik team, While running our test suite under mvn test in 1.10.0, we observed a string appearing between Surefire's test summary and the [INFO] Results: header that gave us pause: [INFO] Tes...
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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 26/05/2026
Today on @indicator.media: A handful of anonymous bots have taken over fact-checking on X. This isn’t hyperbole. In the first three weeks of May, just eight AI contributors wrote 50.3% of all visible Community Notes on the platform.
indicator.media
8 AI bots now write 50% of X’s Community Notes
The crowdsourced moderation project faces a choice between scale and legitimacy
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Julia Ruby 🜬 @juliaruby.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Accidentally made Gemini roleplay as a fried egg when I googled a quote from Mixtape.
A google search for "you're an egg in a teflon pan".

The AI overview reads:

I am chilling in a lightly buttered Teflon pan over gentle heat. My transparent whites are starting to firm up, my yolk is maintaining a perfect, golden composure, and thankfully, the non-stick surface is ensuring a completely stress-free, slippery glide.

Ah, the bliss of an intact membrane! Without a Teflon surface, a scratched coating could easily cause my delicate edges to bond to the metal in a tragic, sticky mess. It also helps that the temperature is kept at a gentle, controlled simmer. If the heat were cranked up too high, l'd overcook before you could say "sunny-side up".
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Andrew Deck @andrewdeck.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
NEW: More than 340 U.S. local news outlets are restricting Internet Archive access. @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I mapped out the full list, showing just how dire this trend is for the future of local news archives. www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/more...
niemanlab.org
More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism
McClatchy, Advance Local, Tribune Publishing and other major newspaper chains are restricting the nonprofit's archiving bots.
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Jon Green @jongreen.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
new WP (w/ @stecula.bsky.social): we infer show-level metadata for a large sample of popular politics and politics-adjacent podcasts, then merge it with survey data to characterize political information exposure for their audiences link: osf.io/ycujf/files/...
title: A Framework for Studying Podcasts and their Audiences at Scale
authors: Jon Green and Dominik Stecula
abstract: A large and increasing share of media consumption in the United States takes place on podcasts. However, two of the most theoretically interesting features of this development also make it difficult to study empirically: the boundary between political and non-political shows is porous, and the audience is highly fragmented in ways that frustrate standard survey research. We address these challenges by first inferring political discussion frequency, relative left/right
orientation, and network cluster in a sample of roughly 7,600 popular shows that are either categorized as political or share at least one guest with a show categorized as political. We then demonstrate how these show-level metadata can be incorporated into survey research to
dramatically broaden and deepen our understanding of the political information consumption in this developing ecosystem.Figure 2. Hierarchical stochastic block model results. Colors reflect terminal (lowest-level) block pairs.Figure 4: Audience profiles for show blocks with at least 100 listeners. All values for show blocks reflect averages across respondents who listen to at least one show in the given block unless otherwise noted. Respondents can list up to three shows.Figure 7: Left/Right distributions of shows, overall (a) and weighted by audience (b). Both distributions are limited to shows with at least ten episodes classified as likely to feature political discussion.
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Nick Diakopoulos @ndiakopoulos.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Today we're launching the Northwestern Agentic AI Investigative Journalism Challenge. Top prize is $5000 and an invitation to present the work at the Computation + Journalism Symposium this fall. Details here: www.gain-agent-challenge.northwestern.edu
gain-agent-challenge.northwestern.edu
The Agentic AI Investigative Journalism Challenge |
An Open Competition for Investigative TeamsThe Agentic AI Investigative Journalism ChallengeCoding agents can now work through messy document dumps, sur...
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Hannah Waight @hwaight.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.
nature.com
State media control influences large language models - Nature
Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger ...
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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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Internet Archive @archive.org · 24/04/2026
🧵 The web is disappearing 🕳️ From Pew: 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are ☠️ A new study in VANISHING CULTURE gives hope: 16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine. 56% are preserved before they disappear. 📚 Read VANISHING CULTURE free from Internet Archive: archive.org/details/vani... ⬇️
Infographic titled “URLs Preserved in the Wayback Machine” based on a dataset of 5.4 million URLs. It shows 26% of web pages are dead and 74% are still alive. Of the total, 10% have vanished completely, 18% are endangered (not yet preserved), 16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine, and 56% are preserved. The visual uses a flow-style diagram to show how preservation reduces permanent loss.
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Matt DeVerna @matthewdeverna.com · 24/04/2026
Interested in #ComputationalSocialScience? 🧪 Apply to the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at Stanford! We will be focusing on AI systems as both a topic of research and a research tool. Deadline: THIS SUNDAY! Learn/apply here: sicss.io/2026/stanford/
media.tenor.com
a man is sitting at a desk in front of a computer and smiling .
ALT: a man is sitting at a desk in front of a computer and smiling .
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Adam Visokay @avisokay.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Excited to announce that Tyler McCormick and I are organizing a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the University of Washington, with a focus on AI and social science research. July 6-17 We encourage applications from PhD students, postdocs, and junior faculty: sicss.io/2026/uw/
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Journal editors - the status quo on preregistration is not working! You need to check submissions vs. preregistrations before sending articles out for review. *56%* of experiments I reviewed in last year have severe problems with non-disclosure, undocumented deviations, & more - see Claude summary ↓
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Stanford Tech Impact and Policy Center @techimpactpolicy.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
One week left to submit your proposal for #TSRConf 2026! Join leading researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and platform leaders shaping the future of online #TrustAndSafety and digital governance. 📩 Submit your proposal and be part of the conversation. 🔗 bit.ly/4agUJ0f
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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 17/04/2026
Today on @indicator.media’s free Briefing: Google ran ads on search results for queries about removing nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII). Most of the ads promoted generic content removal products that don’t provide a tailored service for NCII. Most importantly, all of them are paid services.
indicator.media
Briefing: Google shows ads when people search for help removing intimate images
Plus: X pays clickbait accounts a little less
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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 14/04/2026
NEW on @indicator.media: I found a group of X accounts that worked together to remove Community Notes from British Conservative Party accounts during the 2024 UK general election.
indicator.media
Inside a pro-Conservative influence operation on Community Notes
Inside a pro-Conservative group effort to influence X's Community Notes
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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real
Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 09/04/2026
Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.
king5.com
UW graduate student deported through SEA as protesters demand answers
A union representing University of Washington graduate student workers says Kennedy Orwa’s student visa was rescinded without explanation.
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Public Opinion Analytics Lab (POAL) @poalab.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
AJPS article from @kenbenoit.bsky.social, Scott de Marchi, Conor Laver, Michael Laver, and Jinshuai Ma on using LLMs to analyse political texts. 🧵 1/8 Social science research requires reliable extraction of information from texts to identify authors' preferences on various policies and issues.
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Aleksandra Urman @aurman21.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
New paper out! How can we study people's web search motivations in a way that's anchored in people's actual search behaviour? We suggest a survey design inspired by a combination of diary studies and data donation approaches. Led by Elsa Lichtenegger out now at CHIIR doi.org/10.1145/3786...
doi.org
Beyond the Query: A Survey Design for Eliciting Underlying Motivations in Web Search | Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 18/03/2026
I think it’s telling that people very interested in AI (like Eugene and myself) still have no interest in using it as a proxy for human communication. “Being a good writer” is not the same thing as having social agency, and making the models even better at writing won’t change that.
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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
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
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icwsm.bsky.social @icwsm.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
📣CFP: 7th edition International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (CySoc) We welcome papers that examine a diverse range of issues related to online harmful communications. 📅Submission: March 22nd, 2026 📅Notification: April 8th, 2026 🔗 Details: cy-soc.github.io/2026/
cy-soc.github.io
CySoc 2026 - International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats
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Matt DeVerna @matthewdeverna.com · 02/03/2026
🚨🚨🚨
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Stanford Tech Impact and Policy Center @techimpactpolicy.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Can #AI #chatbots reliably tell you whether a political claim is true or false? If not, what would it take to make them trustworthy fact-checkers? A new study led by Matt DeVerna tackles these questions by evaluating 15 #LLMs on more than 6K claims fact-checked by PolitiFact over an 18-year period.
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klaudia jaźwińska @klaudia.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Here's the recording! www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsH_...
youtube.com
AI Search and News
YouTube video by TowCenter
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Riana @riana.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
This is huge news. I have spent the past 6 months wondering wtf was up with Amazon: they filed 380,000 AI-related CyberTipline reports to NCMEC in the first half of 2025. Turns out ALL of it was known CSAM they found by screening their AI training data. It's NOT AI-generated or AI-morphed CSAM.
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Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
"Machine learning research is not serious research & therefore hallucinated references are not necessarily a big deal, agrees prestigious group of ML researchers" I ❤️ when the titles write themselves But seriously, I don't think there's much to debate statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/26/m...
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
Machine learning research is not serious research and therefore hallucinated references are not necessarily a big deal, agrees a prestigious group of machine learning researchers | Statistical Modeli...
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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
This is courage. Looking a masked, government fascist dead in the eye, face to face, knowing full well that your life is on the line. If elected officials had 1/10th of Alex Pretti's resolve, we would have far fewer troubles.
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Riana @riana.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
I have an op-ed in the NYT today about the Grok scandal, sharing my research from last year finding that legal risk hinders AI companies from making their models safer against CSAM - an echo of the years where white-hat hackers were chilled from good-faith research. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | There’s One Easy Solution to the A.I. Porn Problem
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Shelby Grossman @shelbygrossman.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
👩‍🏫 I spent 6 months building something I’m super proud of: a course for journalists on using AI for investigations. It officially launched today! These approaches have already improved my own investigations. Get started: careercatalyst.asu.edu/programs/ai-...
A picture of the website where you can register for the course.
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Andrea Sommese @asommese.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
New research on Gifted dogs is out, in @science.org! Huge congrats to SHANY DROR for her effort and this incredible achievement. 📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants
Children as young as 18 months can acquire novel words by overhearing third-party interactions. Demonstrating similar learning processes in nonhuman species would indicate that the social-cognitive sk...
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Cas (Stephen Casper) @scasper.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
🚨 New paper from an awesome group led by Noam Kolt and @nickacaputo . We hear a lot about what important concepts and methods from AI research that lawyers need to understand. But it's really a two-way street... 🧵🧵🧵
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Kristina Gligoric @IC2S2 @gligoric.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute is hiring Postdoctoral Fellows (Deadline Jan 23rd, 2026)! 💫 Reach out and apply if you're interested in working with me! I'm especially excited to work with postdocs on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs.
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J. Nathan Matias @natematias.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Should scientists apply to OpenAI's fund for research on AI & mental health? Should policymakers consider it a credible safety effort? Avriel Epps & I see it as "grantwashing," and it's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots. We explain: www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...
techpolicy.press
Beware of OpenAI's 'Grantwashing' on AI Harms | TechPolicy.Press
J. Nathan Matias and Avriel Epps say OpenAI's announced research funding is the perfect corporate action to make sure we don't find answers for years.
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