Amy Zhang

Can’t say I really consider myself an expert in this area given the many exemplary leaders I see around me, but it was a great time chatting on this podcast! Thanks for having me!

Haha, aw that is very high praise coming from you! Dream team right here!!

The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X.

Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)

Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...

Post quoting another post with an image. Things I notice: - The quoted post is truncated with an ellipsis so it doesn’t take up the whole screen. - There’s a “1/8” widget after the text of the quoted post, indicating that it’s a thread. - The user’s handle and avatar are the only identification on the post; there’s no display name clutter. - Relative date formats aren’t used.

Quote of a post that embeds a video and an image in a scrollable carousel. - The video smoothly autoplays inside the carousel. - Scrolling the carousel works perfectly. - Tapping the image or the video animates it to fill the screen with no jank. - You can swipe between the video and the rest of the carousel when it’s full screen and it just works the way you’d want.

Ephemeral “ghost post” that displays differently and gets archived after 24 hours (like Instagram stories)

Suggested post and reply in feed - There’s a nice little “OP liked” social proof thing on the reply. - Also you can’t tell because I’m posting this on srgbsky but the heart icon is a brilliant out-of-gamut red.

Not gonna lie, it’s pretty annoying that every time I download Threads I see a half dozen new interesting meticulously-executed features that are distinct from what any similar app is doing

🚨 New CHI 2026 Workshop 🚨

PoliSim@CHI 2026: LLM Agent Simulation for Policy

The Resonant Computing Manifesto Technology should bring out the best in humanity, not the worst—a manifesto for resonant computing built on five principles that reject hyper-scale extraction for human flourishing.

Remember when the internet wasn't awful? We can go back to that.

Some friends and I have released the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call to bring back such a time, to see if we can bring back a world where technology works for us, rather than against us.

resonantcomputing.org

I'll be at #neurips2025 briefly for the workshop weekend, specifically the Algorithmic Collective Action workshop and Regulatable ML workshop (where @kjfeng.me was selected to give an oral for his workshop paper on regulating agent UIs!). LMK if you're around!

As many know, @bjard.bsky.social and I have been drafting a Technology Law coursebook for a few years. We've used it to teach classes at three institutions, including Yale Law School, and others have used chapters in their techlaw classes.

We're excited to share the current version more broadly!

The UW Center for an Informed Public is looking for postdocs (for 2026-2028) from across diverse disciplines whose research sheds light on the challenges of our modern information environment, promotes civic health, and/or helps people/communities navigate online spaces: apply.interfolio.com/177901

Oh absolutely, we will anonymize all responses in any publication!

it's been a long time coming, but i'm happy to share that my latest creative project is finally here...

@anisota.net is an experimental social client (and game!) for Bluesky and the AT Protocol

i built it for me because i'm kinda weird and needed an equally weird way to experience social media 🕯️

Bright red tree, Japanese maple

White fluffy Samoyed dog in front of tree

Beautiful tree on my walk! (+ cute dog)

Well given there are like 70k? and counting feeds, I’m sure you are not alone! It’s a really interesting use case and has implications for sustainability to have that institutional backing. we will reach out!!

Well this is sure to be a blockbuster AI article... @jennarussell.bsky.social et al are kicking ass and taking names in journalism, both individuals and organizations.

"AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed"
arxiv.org/abs/2510.18774

Yes we will publish what we find! Although I don’t know if we’ll have the answer to that question as we’re mostly talking to feed creators and not users (unless you mean these institutions creating custom feeds? I haven’t heard much about this).

It’s interesting, I feel like there are a good number of tools now for end user feed creation but I don’t know of any supporting end user content moderation/labeling.

Hm I’m thinking about tools to help with creating, maintaining, hosting, monetizing, moderating, etc. feeds. So things like Graze and Skyfeed as examples. I think tools that generally support the feed ecosystem would also be helpful, eg feed recommenders, aggregators, broad analytics.

We are doing a second round of research interviews with people who build feeds (or build tools to build feeds), this time focusing on questions of sustainability.
- Is this a hobby for you, or something else?
- What sustains it in your eyes?
Please fill out the form below, and we'll reach out! 🙏🙏🙏

23 people pose in front of a spiral staircase and concrete wall in Bergen, Norway.

23 people pose in front of a spiral staircase and concrete wall in Bergen, Norway. Some are holding the shape of the letter "W" with their hands, a symbol for the University of Washington.

Members of the iSchool community and friends connected at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (#CSCW) conference in Bergen, Norway, earlier this week. Tusen takk - thank you very much - to everyone who paused for a group photo and catch-up session! 💜

Congrats to @galenweld.bsky.social for winning yet another paper award for his great work on measuring perceptions of community moderation at Reddit scale! #cscw2025

If you're at @acm-cscw.bsky.social #cscw
in Bergen, come check out our 🏆honorable mention paper today on Reddit community governance (w/
@axz.bsky.social @timalthoff.bsky.social ). 4pm in Dovregubben-2! More in thread... 🧵

Just arrived in Bergen for CSCW, where I'll present Venire! Venire is a Reddit moderation tool that uses an ML model trained on mod decision histories to identify controversial cases. It preempts inconsistent decision-making by flagging these cases for multi-mod review

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Excited to share my first research paper on social virtual reality✨🎮 (for #cscw2025 )!

Social VR provides an immersive gaming experience that builds closer relationships. However, this same immersiveness also makes embodied harassment in social VR more traumatizing :(

a clip from TV from the stands of the baseball game at 2-2, with me in the top left corner

I picked a great day to go see some baseball yesterday! There's us in the stands! GOMS 🔱

Image of alpine mountains with a lake shore on the bottom. There is the AlpCHI logo overlaid and the text "Interaction in Nature, in the Wild, at the summit" and "Submission October 20th, 2025 (AoE)".

💡Submission deadline: October 20th, 2025

Beyond this year’s theme, we warmly invite all relevant research in HCI on how we design, adapt, and experience technologies within all environments!

👉 Submit here: easychair.org/my/conferenc...
📄CfP: alpchi.org/call-for-pap...

#AlpCHI2026 #HCI #CfP

To conclude, we argue for better ways for researchers to collaborate with neurodivergent users and their communities. We also suggest building social computing systems that are more spectrum-conscious and designing for double empathy rather than only on the neurodivergent side.

"...This is present throughout many of these papers, from harmful generalizations about the 'problem' of disability in their introductions to the celebrations of newfound productivity irrespective of neurodivergent experiences."

"...Even after filtering out hundreds of skills training games and other mainstreaming technologies, the sentiment remains clear---neurodiverse social computing research seeks to mainstream or isolate neurodivergent people to preserve existing platforms and social spaces..."

"...They are purely output, expected to tolerate sensors, speak as many words as they can without acknowledgement of their content, and be productive should they appear in corporations or higher education..."

"We now have a depiction of neurodivergent people in existing social computing research. Most often, they are children, and a large majority of these children are male. They are spoken for, not with..."