Hamsa Bastani

Opinion | I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.

Such a great article!! Well worth reading instead of using chatgpt to summarize 😂
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o...

Thanks!! P.s. just so you know, you're the only reason I post on bluesky 😂

Joint work w/ amazing team @obastani.bsky.social, Alp Süngü, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı, & Rei Mariman.

Grateful for thoughtful feedback from Eric Bradlow, Angela Duckworth, Stefan Feuerriegel, Benjamin Lira Luttges, Lilach M., Ananya Sen, Christian Terwiesch, Lyle Ungar, & many others

Out in @pnas.org today!! We ran a field experiment with ~1000 high school students & found:

✅ GenAI tutoring boosts practice perf
⚠️ But hinders human learning, hurting perf when AI access is removed
🛡️ Safeguards like hint-based help can offset this
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...

Cool paper using brain imaging to track cognitive load while writing essays! As expected, people under-use their brain when using LLM assistance, but interestingly, they also struggle more when switching back to writing on their own -- AI assistance creates "cognitive debt"
arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Research increasingly shows that AI without appropriate guardrails can harm students' long-term learning and engagement. This is not something to be rushed into without careful experimentation and resources, especially when it comes to our young kids.

Opinion | A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12

"Putting more screens in our classrooms is not going to automatically lead to a smarter, healthier or better-employed population. And parents of all backgrounds need to stand up and shout it now."

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/o...

Stochastic Online Conformal Prediction with Semi-Bandit Feedback Conformal prediction has emerged as an effective strategy for uncertainty quantification by modifying a model to output sets of labels instead of a single label. These prediction sets come with the gu...

Conformal prediction sets are a useful way to capture uncertainty for LLMs & deep learning models. But they're data-hungry! We propose a semi-bandit algo to learn these sets online. Check out our @icmlconf.bsky.social paper: arxiv.org/abs/2405.13268

Work led by Haosen Ge, w/ @obastani.bsky.social

YouTube video by Edutopia How AI Vaporizes Long-Term Learning

Great video summarizing our research! AI in education needs to be carefully designed to ensure we support critical thinking & learning

W/ @obastani.bsky.social Alp Haosen Ozge Rei

youtube.com/watch?v=n2W_...

Excited to once again co-organize the 4th Annual Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good at UMD on 5/2 with Margret Bjarnadottir, Jessica Clark, Jui Ramprasad, and John Silberholz! Early-career scholars, please submit your "AI for good" work by 2/14:
www.rhsmith.umd.edu/departments/...

The 2025 Economic Report of the President | CEA | The White House Today, the Council of Economic Advisers under the leadership of Chair Jared Bernstein released the 2025 Economic Report of the President, the 79th report since the establishment of CEA in 1946. The 20...

Excited to see our paper "Generative AI Can Harm Learning" cited in Ch 7 of the 2025 Economic Report of the President: whitehouse.gov/cea/written-...

Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers...., co-authored with @obastani.bsky.social, Alp, Haosen, Ozge & Rei

Hi folks, I'm new here! 👋🏾