iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

New preprint! A review article on Generative AI and Society, with the fantastic @thomasdavidson.bsky.social & Danny Karell (smartly not online!) osf.io/preprints/so... The lit on genAI is sprawling and mostly not in sociology. Our goal is to synthesize core themes relevant to sociologists. +

GENERATIVE AI AND SOCIETY
Laura K. Nelson,
Daniel Karell,
and Thomas Davidson

ABSTRACT
For sociologists, generative AI inherits the legacy of earlier computational technologies: it is an advancement of machine learning already adopted as a methodology, and it intervenes in a society already shaped by algorithmic systems. Yet it also has a dimension that distinguishes it from previous computational methods, and one that makes it inherently sociological: its interactivity. In this review, we conceptualize the interactivity of generative AI and introduce a framework for understanding how it operates across individual, organizational, and institutional life. Specifically, the framework specifies how generative AI expands users, functions as a proxy for society, and expresses power,
both in sociological practice and in society. We conclude by suggesting three dynamics driven by generative AI that sociology will face in the near future: the transformation of scientific practice, the reorganization of social interaction, and the acceleration of algorithmic governance.

Keywords: generative AI, interaction, computational sociology, methods, algorithms, algorithmic governance

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Heartily endorsing this important piece! As I argued earlier this year, social research did not just emerge from a prior moment of social change, it did crucial sensemaking about that change, up to and including the present. That work must continue and be independent. www.amacad.org/publication/...

amacad.org

Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool

Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools...

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

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

A view from a plane over Burlington VT on a cloudy day

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Joshua Tucker @jatucker.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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

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Wissensnetzwerk Rechtsextremismusforschung @wi-rex.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

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...

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Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms @woahworkshop.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

📢 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

docs.google.com

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...

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

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.

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Ingmar Weber @ingmarweber.de · 27/05/2026

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.

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

William J. Brady @williambrady.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

✨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? 🧵🔗 👇

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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

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...

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

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/...

amacad.org

Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

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?

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

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:

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

ASA SKAT @asaskat.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

📣 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.

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Petter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com · 22/04/2026

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!

journalqd.org

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization | Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms @woahworkshop.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

🚨 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

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

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.

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Joris Frese @fresejoris.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

📄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

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Étienne Ollion @eollion.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

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

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

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.

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

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

A screenshot of a wall of text. The text begins by describing a task presented by a user and then turns into gibberish, repeating many different words and names without any structure. A second image is similar but includes lots of symbols.

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

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...

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms @woahworkshop.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

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

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

PNAS Nexus @pnasnexus.org · 05/03/2026

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: ow.ly/1moU50YpOHN

General strike participants leaving shipyards, Seattle, February 1919. This image of workers was taken at the Skinner & Eddy Corporation shipyard located between Dearborn Street and Connecticut Street (now Royal Brougham Way). The nitrate photo shows signs of deterioration on some light parts of the image.

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Emma Zang @dremmazang.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

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.

yalefds.swoogo.com

Home

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Andrey Chetverikov @achetverikov.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

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

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

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.”

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

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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Chris Bail @chrisbail.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

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

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

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Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

a gpt in a sublime 200 lines of pure Python — it is all there. Incredible for teaching students (and yourself) karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/m...

karpathy.github.io

microgpt

Musings of a Computer Scientist.

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Christopher Barrie @cbarrie.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Come work w CSMaP! We're hiring two postdocs.: one with a focus on AI; other is general focus. Let me know if you have questions about the roles. And please share widely. apply.interfolio.com/181817 apply.interfolio.com/181820

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Josh Nguyen @joshnguyen.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Benchmarks of LLM common sense overwhelmingly rely on correct labels to report an accuracy score. But what if your "ground truth" genuinely differs from mine? In a new @pnasnexus.org paper, @duncanjwatts.bsky.social, @whiting.me and I explore the implications of this intriguing question. 🧵⤵️

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Rense Corten 🟥 @rensec.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

📢WORK! At the Sociology department of @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social we are hiring a postdoc who will work on applications of AI in sociological research. Join our vibrant-yet-cohesive research community doing cutting-edge research. Please share or apply! www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

uu.nl

Postdoctoral researcher on applications of AI in sociological research

Are you able to lead sociological research into the AI age?

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

AI does not engage in motivated reasoning While individuals processing information may be motivated to reach a certain conclusion, LLMs have no such motivation and operate on purely cognitive input. As such, they do not mimic humans in motivated reasoning tasks. arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16130

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026

LLMs are very good at extracting information from academic articles. They are much better than even highly trained humans (our grad RAs had hundreds of hours of practice). And of course they're ~1000x cheaper and faster

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Recent publications arguing against the use of genAI in reflexive qual research inspired us (Elida Ibrahim and @andreavoyer.bsky.social) to write our own perspective. Not to convince anyone to use genAI but for those who might be interested and are looking for guidance. osf.io/preprints/so...

Screen shot of title page of a preprint.
Title: Should generative AI be used in reflexive qualitative research?
Authors: Elida Izani Ibrahim, Laura K. Nelson, and Andrea Voyer

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Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

New paper examines the relationship between online political discourse and structural conditions. European parties responded to national asylum numbers by increasing online attention, but content differed. Left-wing parties posted more in solidarity and right-wing parties shared more about crime.

tandfonline.com

Structuring articulation: asylum applications and elite political communication on social media during the European refugee crisis

How do political parties adapt their discourse when confronted with rapidly changing structural conditions? This study examines the relationship between asylum applications and elite political comm...

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Tina Law @tinalaw.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Hey sociologists, I'm organizing an ASA Methodology session on AI! Submissions are due by 2/25. Looking forward to a timely cross-method convo on emerging research best practices and disciplinary norms and ethics in August.

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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 31/01/2026

Very interesting research paper that shows that using AI with programming can significantly reduce mastery over topics. Perhaps unsurprising, but the lack of significant speed gains in this exercise are remarkable www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

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Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Now out in Sociological Science (How) do sociologists use GenAI for their research? Find out in our paper. Written with @ajalvero.bsky.social @dustinstoltz.com and Marshall Taylor. Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey!!

sociologicalscience.com

Generative AI in Sociological Research: State of the Discipline

Article: Generative AI in Sociological Research: State of the Discipline | Sociological Science | Posted January 20, 2026

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Dave Willner @dwillner.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

We just published the methodology behind CoPE, our 9B parameter model that matches GPT-4o at content classification at 1% the size! The model is already open source, but now we're sharing our training technique. blog.zentropi.ai/how-we-built... 🧵 1/6

blog.zentropi.ai

How we built CoPE

We just published the methodology behind CoPE. This is the model that powers Zentropi, and we think the approach might be useful for others working on policy-steerable classification systems. We had ...

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

On the topic of AI and social science research, the Research Briefing on my Nature Human Behaviour paper is now online. It's an accessible summary of the research, implications, and some behind-the-scenes commentary. Thanks @gligoric.bsky.social for providing an expert opinion!

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Putting informed consent aside, there is a strong minimal risk argument for using LLMs to analyze publicly available documents (particularly open-access published research), given that such materials are already routinely ingested by LLMs, with and without researcher intervention.

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Reposted by Thomas Davidson

Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

New paper in Social Science Computer Review 🚨 We conducted two experiments to understand the effects of reading AI summaries, focusing on historical events 📜🤖👩‍💻 We found that AI improved factual recall, possibly due to post-training optimization journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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