iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

pretty cool to see this! on the user side, our CHI '26 paper found that science journalists were excited to use AI for sourcing but still wary of bias in who is surfaced. some preferred suggestions for types of experts to interview for a story, in lieu of specific names: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

dl.acm.org

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Sarah Brouillette @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The introduction to my book is now available online, thanks @dukepress.bsky.social 🫶 The official pub date is in October www.dukeupress.edu/content-mach....

tinyurl.com

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

"prediction" markets incentivize profiteers to find weak spots in the fabric of reality and reweave it for easy money — a kind of reality arbitrage, at the expense of our collective faith in a shared world www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

Prediction markets are “truth machines,” in the sense that they give people incentives to figure out what is true and bet on it. But they are also, obviously and increasingly, falsehood machines, in the sense that they give people incentives to make bets and then distort reality to make those bets pay off. Because of prediction markets, it is now lucrative to figure out what song will be the most popular, but it is even more lucrative to make a different song look most popular. Prediction markets can make it harder to know what is true.

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

We will be in the Grand Hall at the poster session talking about this work from 3.20pm-4.20pm today! Come talk to us to learn about fun tropes and not-so-fun implicit biases! #ACL2026

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

@jackbandy.com and I are presenting new work on gender bias in story generation at the EvalEval workshop @ #ACL2026! We know tropes in film and TV are often implicitly gendered, i.e., nothing in the trope's description marks it as gendered, but one gender is overrepresented in creative depictions.

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I go out of my way to avoid using the word “content” in any writing I do, and reading this makes me realise this is why!

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Got a theory that we are all living through a crisis of agency, at least online. Bots, algorithms, clip armies, & the flood of AI stuff have scrambled notions of popularity, turned everything into a ‘psyop’. AI tools/ agents are reversing the fundamental human, collaborative promise of the internet

theatlantic.com

The Feeling of Control Slipping Away

AI is causing a crisis of agency.

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Nick Diakopoulos @ndiakopoulos.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

🚨 The Computation + Journalism Symposium is coming back to Evanston this fall! Get it on your calendar now for Oct 2-3, 2026. And participate: We’re soliciting contributions for research papers, workshops, and talks now through June 29. More info on the website here: www.cj2026.northwestern.edu

cj2026.northwestern.edu

Homepage | Computation + Journalism 2026 Symposium

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National Trust @nationaltrust.org.uk · 03/05/2026

We have an *extremely* important announcement to make. From Wednesday, we will be launching our puffin live cam, coming to you from the Farne Islands. So you can watch puffins all day long. In celebration, please enjoy this clip of puffins being really busy for 39 seconds straight.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/04/2026

been thinking a lot about this 1972 Weizenbaum paper a lot lately, especially when i hear people say things like access to llms reduce inequality by leveling the playing field, solve the mental health crisis & the loneliness pandemic, etc, all of which are problems rooted in very technology itself

a screenshot reads: The structure of the typical essay
on "The impact of computers on so-
ciety" is as follows: First there is an
"on the one hand" statement. It tells
all the good things oomputers have
already done for society and often even
attempts to argue that the social order
would already have collapsed were it
not for the "computer revolution."
This is usually followed by an "on the
other hand" caution which tells of cer-
tain problems the introduction of com-
puters brings in its wake. The threat
posed to individual privacy by large
data banks and the danger of large-
scale unemployment induced by indus-
trial automation are usually mentioned.
Finally, the glorious present and pro-
spective achievements of the computer
are applauded, while the *dangers al-
luded to in the second part are shown
to be capable of being alleviated by
sophisticated technological fixes. The
closing paragraph consists of a plea
for generous societal support for more,
and more large-scale, computer re-
search and development. This is
usually coupled to the more or less
subtle assertion that only computer
science, hence only the computer sci-
entist, can guard the world against the
admittedly hazardous fallout of applied
computer technology.
In fact, the computer has had very
considerably less societal impact than
the mass media would lead us to be-
lieve. Certainly, there are enterprises
like space travel that could not have
been undertaken without computers.
Certainly the computer industry, and
with it the computer education indus-
try, has grown to enormous propor-
tions. But much of the industry is
self-serving. It is rather like an island
economy in which the natives make a
living by talking in each other's laundry.
The part that is not self-serving is

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Jenn Wortman Vaughan @jennwv.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

At #CHI2026? Check out @sachnishal.bsky.social's talk this Tuesday on how LLM-infused writing tools reshape journalists’ agency — their ability to exercise independent judgment in alignment with their values — in editorial decision making. programs.sigchi.org/chi/2026/pro...

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Attending #CHI2026 in Barcelona? Do you study news and online information ecosystems in HCI? Come hang out with us at lunch! @mariannealq.bsky.social and I are hosting a meetup for folks in this research space on April 13 (Mon), 1-2.30pm! Please RSVP by April 11 (Sat): forms.gle/aKmy3pv47S5M...

forms.gle

HCI + News Lunch @ CHI 2026

Hello! We're excited to bring together researchers and designers working at the intersection of HCI and news / information ecosystems, who will be at CHI 2026. It's a chance to meet others in the comm...

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 04/04/2026

I highly recommend putting this NASA #Artemis II mission livestream on and just leaving it playing as you go about your weekend. Live views of the spacecraft, occasional visualizations of the current config, views of the control room, space-ground radio audio. www.youtube.com/live/m3kR2KK...

youtube.com

NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage (Official Broadcast)

YouTube video by NASA

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Lizzie K. @lizz-iek.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

the point of doing this as a phd student is not just to summarize stuff and make a knowledge map. it is actually primarily to identify your allies, foes, rivals, and to decide who you want to start beef with

BREAKING: Claude can now research like a Stanford PhD student.

Here are 9 insane Claude prompts that turn 40+ research papers into structured literature reviews, knowledge maps, and research gaps in minutes (Save this)

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Kashif Imteyaz @kashifimteyaz.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

📣New paper ! Designing collaborative generative AI is difficult precisely because most generative AI systems are built around efficiency, speed, and individual productivity. In our conditionally accepted #CHI26 paper, we ask: what happens when those assumptions break down?

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🌶 David Gray Widder @davidthewid.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

I get again find myself in the situation of having learned things via peer reviewing papers, but double-blind doesn't let me figure out who to thank (yet!).

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Ian Arawjo @ianarawjo.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

🎉 Thrilled to share that our paper "Reporting and Reviewing LLM-Integrated Systems in HCI: Challenges and Considerations" has been conditionally accepted to #CHI2026! A thread 🧵

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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 10/02/2026

"There are still plenty of places to read about literature.…But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares....The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits." www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Screenshot of an excerpt from a Becca Rothfeld article in the New Yorker: "There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like The Drift and The Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits."

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Nick Seaver @nickseaver.website · 30/01/2026

nice concretizing of the core idea in the history of information overload: overload isn’t a matter of quantity alone, it requires a certain kind of subject to feel overwhelmed. (the early modern scholar who wants to have read every book in the library, the RSS reader who wants inbox zero)

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James Eat World Sr. @jamesodinwade.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

the purpose of a first draft is to exist the purpose of a first draft is to exist the purpose of a first draft is to exist

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Sophie Greenwood @sjgreenwood.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Excited to present a new preprint with @nkgarg.bsky.social: presenting usage statistics and observational findings from Paper Skygest in the first six months of deployment! 🎉📜 arxiv.org/abs/2601.04253

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Duri Long @duri-long.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Excited to announce the publication of our article "AI Unplugged: Exploring Pathways from Physical Simulation to Conceptualization of AI Reasoning Processes" in @acmtoce.bsky.social. We present 4 activities and explore how they support conceptualization of AI reasoning. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

dl.acm.org

AI Unplugged: Exploring Pathways from Physical Simulation to Conceptualization of AI Reasoning Processes | ACM Transactions on Computing Education

Young adolescents interact with AI daily, but there is a lack of approachable, concrete opportunities for them to develop an understanding of AI reasoning processes. We leverage theories of embodied l...

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Aman Bhargava @aman.bh · 21/12/2025

> We archived around 86M music files, representing around 99.6% of listens. It’s a little under 300TB. This is the largest music metadata database that is publicly available. Many interesting 📊 charts on this page that can only be made by having this scale of data. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Chart showing that 70% of songs are ones almost no one ever listens to (stream count < 1000).

A chart titled "Stream Count Analysis by Popularity" showing a histogram of total streams peaking at popularity scores of 60–70, overlaid with a line graph showing average streams per song spiking exponentially at scores of 90–100. Below, a table lists the top three songs by stream count: "Die With A Smile," "BIRDS OF A FEATHER," and "DtMF."

A matrix grid with the title "Audio Features Correlation Heatmaps" showing histograms of musical traits (Tempo, Energy, Valence, etc.) along the diagonal and 2D density heatmaps showing correlations between paired features in the intersecting cells.

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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

another example of AI as tracer dye, exposing an already existing problem (and, of course, significantly worsening it)

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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 19/12/2025

that doesn’t solve the issue of students, journalists, etc. finding and citing fake academic papers, of course—but truly, it’s not an LLM’s fault when professional scholars do this—they are just efficient catalysts for a chemical reaction already underway

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Doing this in my head after a big meal and too much beer, so I could be off, but I think Voyager 1 will reach one (1) light day from Earth in October or November of next year, and one light day from the Sun in January 2027. 🧪 🔭

science.nasa.gov

Where Are Voyager 1 and 2 Now? - NASA Science

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached "interstellar space" and each continue their unique journey deeper into the cosmos.

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Julien Chaumond @julien-c.hf.co · 02/11/2025

Training LLMs end to end is hard. But way more people should, and will, be doing it in the future. The @hf.co Research team is excited to share their new e-book that covers the full pipeline: · pre-training, · post-training, · infra. 200+ pages of what worked and what didn’t. ⤵️

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Matt Miller @thisismattmiller.com · 31/10/2025

Halloween blog post: Italian Giallo Horror Films thisismattmiller.com/post/giallo/ - Using vision language model to analyze a 70 film corpus (🧟) / 80,000 frames - Build and plot “trope clusters” across movies Probably the longest eye acting supercut you've seen: youtu.be/cGrmkOwut6k

thisismattmiller.com

Giallo

Using a vision language model to analyze Italian Giallo films

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

📣 Attention science + tech journalists! Trying to keep up with the flood of research papers that come out every day? Attempting to track what research has already been covered by others, and what may benefit from deeper exploration? You are invited to participate in our research study! [1/3]

A rectangular Northwestern University flyer titled “Call for Study Participants.” The top banner is pink with bold black text reading “CALL FOR STUDY PARTICIPANTS.” Below it, highlighted in yellow, is the question: “Are you a journalist writing about technology and/or computing?” The flyer explains that researchers at Northwestern University are seeking professional journalists who cover technology or related topics, write news in English, and are based in the U.S. to participate in an online study. The study involves using a tool for two weeks, providing feedback, and receiving $100 compensation (IRB Study #STU00224608). It includes a yellow box that says “Fill out our eligibility form if you’re interested!” with the link https://tinyurl.com/newscompass and contact emails: Nick Diakopoulos (nad@northwestern.edu) and Sachita Nishal (nishal@u.northwestern.edu). The Northwestern University seal appears in the top-right corner.

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

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Joshua Rivera @jmrivera.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

“Editing according to traffic is not editing; it’s engineering,” nymag.com/intelligence...

nymag.com

Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?

The grim calculations involved in publishing traditional written reviews.

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar? Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly. A few examples in thread ↴

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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Check out the camera-ready version of our ACL Findings paper ("Taxonomizing Representational Harms using Speech Act Theory") to learn more!!! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00928

arxiv.org

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Jenn Wortman Vaughan @jennwv.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

1. On Saturday, @mnlee.bsky.social will present our work on designing for agency in LLM-infused writing support tools for journalists at the Tools for Thought workshop. Lead author @sachnishal.bsky.social will be nearby at her own workshop on news + HCI! ai-tools-for-thought.github.io/workshop/

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

sometimes when i'm writing a sentence i really like it feels like i'm playing the piano

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Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Holy moly. I'm trying to write an academic paper, and nearly every application I'm using is not only offering Generative AI as an option for writing, but *pushing it* -- pervading the design to the point where a simple misclick would make my content AI-generated. Here's why that's a problem. 🧵

Screenshot of Google docs generative AI agent asking me to Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate, More formal.

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Incredibly amped to co-organize this #CHI2025 workshop on the future of news and HCI 📰📺🌐 Join us in exploring how HCI can support the production, verification and dissemination of trustworthy news in a changing world! 🔗 Details: sites.google.com/view/newsfut... ⏳ Deadline: Feb 20, 2025 (AoE)

sites.google.com

News Futures @ CHI 2025

Welcome to the News Futures Workshop @ CHI 2025! The ways in which news is produced and consumed is constantly reshaped by technological change—today, this takes the form of AI integration in newsroom...

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

can connect playlists meant to deliver indifferent content (e.g. "bossa nova dinner") to the spurious AI-generated genres individualized for each user in Spotify Wrapped; these "genres" have no social meaning and can't be learned or shared, only experienced through more streaming

By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these, including “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “100% Lounge,” “Bossa Nova Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz,” “Deep Sleep,” “Morning Stretch,” and “Detox,” were nearly entirely made up of PFC.

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Sachita Nishal @sachnishal.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

was mildly obsessed with this genre of ad all summer and took a bunch of photos for giggles. I feel they exemplify well this idea of "AI as floating signifier" from Suchman (2023), since they "suggest[s] a specific referent but work[s] to escape definition in order to maximize its suggestive power"

A photo of an ad for Anthropic's Claude at an airport TV. It says "A chatbot. A friend. Claude.ai"

A photo of an ad for Anthropic's Claude at an airport TV. It says "The carry-on that carries your workload. Claude.ai"

A photo of an ad for Anthropic's Claude outside a building. It says "Your shoulder to think on. Claude.ai"

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Jamie McKelvie @mckelvie.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Feel like "fix the motion smoothing" should be replaced by "explain that ChatGPT isn't a search engine" when going home for the holidays now

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Catherine Rockwood @martin65.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

PSA, your local post office probably has Ursula K LeGuin stamps or you can order them by mail.

Photo shows a sheet of US postage stamps each printed with an identical portrait of the writer Ursula K LeGuin.

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Jason Bailey @jasondashbailey.com · 22/11/2024

This, from 2015, was another longread for Flavorwire, on the importance of physical media. Another ongoing hobby horse of mine! I've really just been writing and yelling about the same things for a decade!! www.flavorwire.com/535883/the-p...

flavorwire.com

The Premature Death of Physical Media — and the Cult Home Video Labels Keeping It Alive

Matt Desiderio isn’t sure how he feels about me taking photos of his movie collection. It’s not that he isn’t proud of it — quite the contrary. Falling off the shelves in his living room, carrying ove...

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