Tom Costello
@tomstello_
research psychologist + assistant professor @AmericanU (joining @CarnegieMellon this summer)
Our new paper, out on (the cover of!) Science is now live!
🚨Out in Science!🚨 Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, ya? WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20%! -Lasts over 2mo -Works on entrenched beliefs -Tailored AI response rebuts specific evidence offered by believers science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… 1/
Finally got round to reading this paper in detail. It’s a tour de force. If you’re interested in the potential impact of AI on election outcomes you should put it by your bedside. Key takeaway: let’s remain alive to, but healthily skeptical of, the possibility of large impacts.
How harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @Sacha_Altay’s & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is out via @knightcolumbia.
I was one of the 16 devs in this study. I wanted to speak on my opinions about the causes and mitigation strategies for dev slowdown. I'll say as a "why listen to you?" hook that I experienced a -38% AI-speedup on my assigned issues. I think transparency helps the community.
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
Today (w/ @UniofOxford @Stanford @MIT @LSEnews) 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 🧵
🚨New paper in @TrendsCognSci 🚨 Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? @Jayvanbavel and I review the “psychology of virality,” or the psychological and structural factors that shape information spread online and offline. Thread 🧵(1/n)
This is the game Balatro for programmers
There’s a cursed C++ competition where programmers try to create the largest possible error message. Finalists created ~1.5GB of error messages from just 256 bytes of source. Preprocessor exploits were so easy, they had to create a separate division! Here's my favorites:
Conspiracies emerge in the wake of high-profile events, but you can’t contemporaneously debunk them with evidence ... because little yet exists. Nonetheless, we show that LLMs can debunk conspiracies during an ongoing event (attempted assassination of Trump) in a new WP!
In this letter in @PNASNews, we respond to a comment on our recent paper. Although multiple factors shape whether we act on our intentions, intentions are valuable precursors of behavior that can guide the iterative development of interventions. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
Excited to see our Centaur project out in @Nature. TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates human behavior for any experiment described in natural language.
This argument with 3m views is AI-generated, fwiw (Saying this as someone whose research involves AI persuasion, thus have read many such arguments)
“abolish capitalism!” cool. who grows the food??? no seriously—who’s out there at dawn breaking their back in the dirt, fixing broken irrigation lines, replacing a tractor axle in 110° heat—for free? because you think profit is mean? who mines the lithium for your laptop, the…
I fielded an experiment on dynamic constraint and ended up with null results (surprise!). rather than trying to publish it, or *file-draw* it, here is a blog post where I simply talk about it! Dynamic Constraint and Other Beautiful Lies tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/constraint