Ronald E. Robertson

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.

Simple LLM based Approach to Counter Algospeak Jan Fillies, Adrian Paschke. Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024). 2024.

aclanthology.org/2024.woah-1....

"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...

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.

Opinion | There’s One Easy Solution to the A.I. Porn Problem

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...

A picture of the website where you can register for the course.

👩‍🏫 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-...

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...

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/...

🚨 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...

🧵🧵🧵

Reminds me of a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake. Can't fit the whole thing here, but the key part goes: "... the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you."

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.

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.

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...

Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...

We're hiring interns in the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research NYC!

If you're interested in designing AI‑based systems and understanding their impact at both individual and societal scales, apply here by Jan 9, 2026: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with Andy Guess (Politics/SPIA), Brandon Stewart (Sociology), and me (CS).

puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Please apply before Sunday, the 13th of December!

US CAISI (the equivalent of the US "AI Safety Institute") just put out their approach to AI measurement & there's such a significant portion on construct validity (nist.gov/blogs/caisi-...).

Great to see this after ongoing advocating about this issue (arxiv.org/abs/2511.04703)!

Happy to share our most recent paper, led by @allisonwan.bsky.social, auditing what domains Google shows when you search for a Member of Congress.

journalqd.org/article/view...

@journalqd.bsky.social

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

Auditing Google's AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancy Google Search increasingly surfaces AI-generated content through features like AI Overviews (AIO) and Featured Snippets (FS), which users frequently rely on despite having no control over their presen...

Google AI overviews now reach over 2B users worldwide. But how reliable are they on high stakes topics - for instance, pregnancy and baby care?

We have a new paper - led by Desheng Hu, now accepted at @icwsm.bsky.social - exploring that and finding many issues

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.12920
🧵👇

The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

"participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search

to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

bsky.app/profile/anna...

Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable gr...

Google has moved from moral cowardice (removing ICE tracking apps) to direct complicity in the violent, unconstitutional abuse of vulnerable people.

As a civil liberties lawyer who worked at Google for ten years, this one hits me in the gut.

🚨 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2026. If you're interested in AI, HCI, and designing better online platforms and experiences, apply to work with me!
More info: piccardi.me

Grokipedia cites a Nazi forum and fringe conspiracy websites A site-wide comparison with Wikipedia sheds light on what Elon Musk is trying to do

NEW on @indicator.media: A first *full-scale* comparison of Grokipedia v Wikipedia.

Last week the awesome @harold.bsky.social rocked up to my desk bearing gifts.

Hal had collected almost all 900K Grokipedia entries and compared them to their Wikipedia equivalents for text and citation similarity.

The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia The free internet encyclopedia is widely used to train AI. That’s why conservatives are trying to dethrone it.

New from me: “working the refs” has come for Wikipedia. The same type of attacks alleging anti-conservative bias that right wing politicians have make about social media are coming for the encyclopedia — because of its critical role in shaping AI answer engines.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

Cornell agreed to pay $30m, hand over admissions data with demographic breakdowns, produce annual "campus climate" surveys to check on antisemitism and changes "since October of 2023," and—here's the dumbest part they agreed to—that the govt can open new investigations whenever it wants.

Appeasers.

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.

10% of Meta's 2024 ad revenue came from outright frauds and scams; the platform shows consumers 15 billion ads for fraud and scams every single day. This doesn't even include agitprop and AI slop.

the existential collapse of this monumental pile of shit company simply can't come quickly enough

I'm recruiting multiple PhD students for Fall 2026 in Computer Science at @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social 🍂

Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!

Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!