Yara Kyrychenko

We have a new paper out on how the AI boom is creating a scientific monoculture! Everything AI.

"The task for social science is to ensure that, in navigating this moment, we do not become artificial ourselves."

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Led by the brilliant @cecilietraberg.bsky.social

Very cool to receive the Japanese edition of the Psychology of Misinformation!

🧠 Запрошуємо взяти участь у дослідженні про те, як соціальні мережі впливають на поведінку людей у контексті війни росії проти України.

🎁 Учасники, які завершать всі частини дослідження, зможуть взяти участь у розіграші призів

👉 Долучитися: cambridge.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

#Ukraine

LLMs need immunization to protect against misinformation!

New out in The Lancet Digital Health with the brill @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social where we argue that AI systems should be inoculated against misinformation!

We offer three broad ways to inoculate LLMs

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

How to deal with the survey-taking AI agents that threaten to upend social science Researchers need new bot-detection strategies that exploit the limits of human reasoning rather than AI weaknesses.

How to deal with the survey-taking AI agents that threaten to upend social science.
(Folco Panizza, @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social & Jon Roozenbeek, @nature.com)
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Principal Research Scientist Remote

Cool/important job alert:

Principal Research Scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation's
Research team for the area of knowledge integrity

Job posting: job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jo...

Key barrier to online fraud can be bypassed for pennies, say researchers A central barrier to the creation of bogus social media accounts can be bypassed for as little as a few cents at a time, researchers at the University of Cambridge determined, a sign of just how low t...

WhatsApp responded to the findings of our new Cambridge Trust and Safety index:

"WhatsApp said in a statement that it welcomed the research into an industry it said was "aiming to mislead internet services."

Unsurprisingly, X did not return messages seeking comment

www.reuters.com/business/med...

Price of a 'bot army' revealed across hundreds of online platforms worldwide The first global index tracking real-time prices for buying fake account verifications on 500+ online platforms in every country has been launched by a team at the University of Cambridge.

Press release www.cam.ac.uk/stories/pric...

Mapping the online manipulation economy A market perspective on digital manipulation may help improve online trust and safety

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.

New paper in Science:

In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization.

🧵

Towards scalable pro-social AI - Gates Cambridge Yara Kyrychenko's PhD explores how social media and social technology can be used to promote pro-social behaviour rather than to stoke divisions.

Yara Kyrychenko's PhD explores how social media and social technology can be used to promote pro-social behaviour rather than to stoke divisions - www.gatescambridge.org/about/news/t...

@uniofcam.bsky.social @kingscollege.bsky.social @gatesfoundation.bsky.social

Thank you for all of your support Sander!!

Excited to share that I’ve been shortlisted for the Women of the Future Awards in Artificial Intelligence! 🎉

awards.womenofthefuture.co.uk/our-alumni-c...

Congratulations to @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social for being short-listed as a finalist for the Women of the Future Awards in AI! Yara is a massively brilliant scholar so proud 👏 🥳

"For eighteen years, the awards have shone a light on trailblazing women"

awards.womenofthefuture.co.uk/our-alumni-c...

Today (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19  LLMs, 707 political issues.

We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more! 

🧵:

The combination of #artificialintelligence and #socialmedia poses a threat to democracy.

Our new paper explains how AI swarms can fabricate grassroots consensus, fragment shared reality, engage in mass harassment, interfer with elections, and erode institutional trust: osf.io/preprints/os...

Excited to be part of the Riga StratCom Dialogue this year!

What is AI slop? Why you are seeing more fake photos and videos in your social media feeds Cheap, low-quality AI-generated content is still extremely attention-grabbing – and thus lucrative for both creators and platforms.

We wrote an article about the rise of AI slop and the 'enshittification' of the internet for @theconversation.com with the brilliant @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social

One of these days, these bots are gonna walk all over you!

theconversation.com/what-is-ai-s...

Today at #TheWebConf: C3AI – Crafting & Evaluating Constitutions for AI

How should we actually write rules for AI?

C3AI provides a way to:
1. Design effective constitutions using psychology and public input.
2. Evaluate how well fine-tuned models actually follow the rules.

Does communicating the scientific consensus on climate change inspire support for action? In a new meta-analysis of the GBM (n = 12,975) we find that scientific consensus increases support for climate action directly & indirectly across the political spectrum!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Who is susceptible to misinformation? We looked at >60,000 people from 24 countries who took our MIST test. Key results: Gen Z are more susceptible & those on the extreme right (but they don't know it).

Led by the brill @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social & Fritz Götz

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

my profile page on flashes, a photo sharing app. recent photos i posted show up there in a grid display

Here’s my account on Flashes, a photo sharing app. All my followers can automatically find me as soon as they log in!

This is what we mean when we say Bluesky is open: your identity and followers belong to you. It took 30s to sign up for this new, independent app, and everything is there.

Are you bored this weekend?

Can I interest you in some of the freshest thinking coming out of the academy today?

Try ePODstemology!

Our latest episode is Cambridge's Yara Kyrychenko on socially responsible AI.

Had a great time on ePODstemology talking with @markfabian.bsky.social about my research on socially responsible AI. Tune in! 🎙️🤖

Great to see the Climate Change Committee (CCC) calling for public figures to “lead by example” on climate change, citing our research.

CCC says leading by example increases public buy-in and behaviour change @thecccuk.bsky.social

🚨So, we've made this new infographic showing how it works...
🧵

Out in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social

Can people tell true from false news?

Yes! Our meta-analysis shows that people rate true news as more accurate than false news (d = 1.12) and were better at spotting false news than at recognizing true news (d = 0.32).

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Last year, we published a paper showing that AI models can "debunk" conspiracy theories via personalized conversations. That paper raised a major question: WHY are the human<>AI convos so effective? In a new working paper, we have some answers.

TLDR: facts

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Absolute honor to receive the Vice-Chancellor's Research Impact Award. Thank you Prof Prentice & the whole panel. Our lab at Cambridge has been working many years empowering people to spot misinformation, reaching over half a billion people. Thanks for this recognition🙏 www.cam.ac.uk/public-engag...

Realizing the full potential of behavioural science for climate change mitigation - Nature Climate Change Behavioural science offers valuable insights for mitigating climate change, but existing work focuses mostly on consumption and lacks coordination across disciplines. In this Perspective, the authors ...

Systematic evidence will generate higher-quality behavioral insights that could be integrated into climate policy, life cycle assessments, and economic models.

We offered some suggestions for this in our paper.

@cameronbrick.bsky.social @colognaviktoria.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tiktok boosted Republican messages 11.8% more than Democrat messages during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Race according to this new study that employed bots to view ~394,000 videos.