Keep pushing & don't forget the bigger picture :)
Travel grants 📣
For the 13th Toulouse Economics & Biology Workshop (June 1–2, 2026, @IAST) we have travel fellowships for PhDs & early-career researchers presenting a poster. Apply by Feb 27! Details: www.iast.fr/conferences/...
Science Advances: LLM populations develop social conventions through decentralized interactions alone.
Most striking: collective biases emerge even when individual agents show NO bias. Group dynamics create preferences no single agent has.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu9368
This is a good metaphor for science.
At Stanford Feb 4–6 (GSB talk on the 4th). Around to chat about AI swarms, norms, collective alignment, and governance risks in multi-agent systems incl social media and blockchain. Ping or DM me.
Our new collective effort highlights what happens when AI acts in populations rather than as isolated tool. TL;DR: a lot.
Tremendously important work...👇
How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @daniel-thilo.bsky.social @kunstjonas.bsky.social et al.
AI swarms are can be used to engineering a "synthetic
consensus" that can manipulate public opinion and perceptions.
Long overdue refresh of the SocioPatterns website! ✨ sociopatterns.org New content & datasets, and a chance to celebrate 17+ years of collabs, ~100 publications, 2000+ studies using our data. Thanks – more ahead! @alainbarrat.bsky.social @wouter-vdb.bsky.social @foolsdelight.bsky.social @isi.it
👇
Happy to be hosting @baronca.bsky.social and Johan Bollen here this week at the @exeter.ac.uk @exetercompsci.bsky.social. After a work day, we had a chance to go for a drink and dinner with them (w/ @diogofpacheco.bsky.social)
Our review on multilayer network science is out on the arXiv. Thanks to all collaborators of the AccelNet MultiNet project, great working with you all 🙏 @alexvespi.bsky.social @ymoreno.bsky.social @lordgrilo.bsky.social @anduviera.bsky.social @baronca.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.23371
New preprint: More is different for AI multi-agent systems - but what does more mean?
arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
With @ariel-flint.bsky.social, @lajello.bsky.social and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras.
Nowadays, often the justification for choosing M$ is that it claims to be GDPR compliant, which just means that M$ can afford getting sued for any breach, which of course happens all the time. And universities don't care about potential breaches themselves, only about liability, which M$ absorbs.
Group size effects and collective misalignment in LLM multi-agent systems arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
New preprint: More is different for AI multi-agent systems - but what does more mean?
arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
With @ariel-flint.bsky.social, @lajello.bsky.social and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras.
Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents
“LLMs don’t understand.”
Of course. That was never the point.
The point is: we’re already using them as if they do —
to moderate, to classify, to prioritize, to decide.
That’s not a model problem.
It’s a systemic one.
The shift from verification to plausibility is real.
Welcome to Epistemia.
'I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.'
Researchers say Israeli government likely behind AI-generated disinfo campaign in Iran
cyberscoop.com/citizen-lab-...
It was a ton of fun to play a small role in this project lead by the brilliant Marta Ewa Lech & @jonassjuul.bsky.social. A lot of drama & change in the world of music reflected in the song-dynamics of the Billboard Hot 100!
There are two ways to deal with LLMs in our work
One is the path of abundance: automate everything and multiply publications at the expense of quality
The other is the path of focusing on the soul of the work, on the questions that still matter - to you - when everything else has been made trivial
Breaking: the court ruling in Wikipedia's legal challenge to the Online Safety Act categorisation regime has just been handed down. The court dismissed Wikipedia's challenge. This is bad. This is very bad. wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08...
Presented our work, “Cultural and Cognitive Insights from 2.6 Billion Drawings,” at @ic2s2.bsky.social this morning. Big thanks to Mauro Martino, Nima Dehmamy, @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social, @lajello.bsky.social, and @baronca.bsky.social for the collaboration ✨
Stay tuned for more results!
Looking forward to it!
🚨Are moral judgements biased by the gender of the subject?
We find *no* direct effect when looking at Reddit!
Our causal study design is based on carefully matching similar situations that people with different genders experience (and share).
Study led by @loreb92.bsky.social
rdcu.be/eumlQ
This may be useful to understand the complex systems concepts used in the paper, including coordination and (spontaneous) emergence royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
Our preprint “How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy” is now online.
We show how coordinated multi-agent LLM swarms can infiltrate communities, craft synthetic grassroots “consensus,” and erode institutional trust—and what we can do now to stop it.
osf.io/preprints/os...
New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance
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At #ICWSM? Here's a starter pack for you :)
bsky.app/starter-pack...
Check also "Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs" ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...
