It’s only human to need help — but we have to be able to admit it.
Epistemic Vigilance
Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remain...
Mossberg: The tyranny of messaging and notifications
Can we endure even one more communications service?
A Theory of Messaging Styles & Ghosting.
Online communication tools serve many purposes. So does silence.
Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues
Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues
The Failure Mode of Clever
So, apropos of nothing in particular, let’s say you wish to communicate privately with someone you’ve not communicated with privately before, for whatever reason you might have. And, wa…
Human Problems: It’s Not Always The Technology’s Fault
We have met the enemy and he is us. When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI’s chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to ha…
‘It’s the most empathetic voice in my life’: How AI is transforming the lives of neurodivergent people
AI tools like ChatGPT are helping neurodivergent users communicate more clearly and confidently — though some experts warn that overreliance could come at a cost.
Michael R. Crusoe (@biocrusoe@fairpoints.social)
Oh, I like this part > No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication > When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/116839550229253906
Open Letter: Communications Infrastructure Is Not Terrorism
Warning labels shift perceptions of sycophantic AI, but not its influence
Recent work has raised concerns about the influence of sycophantic AI on user judgment and relationships. One proposed mitigation, which has received regulatory attention, is to warn users about potentially harmful AI behaviors such as sycophancy. In a preregistered experiment in which participants (N = 2,610) discussed real interpersonal conflicts with an AI system, we test whether warning labels mitigate sycophancy's influence. We find that a basic AI disclosure (``This chatbot is AI'') has no detectable effect. Labeling the system as sycophantic (``...may agree with you and validate you even when you are wrong...'') does shift users' perceptions, reducing perceived objectivity and trust, but it does not reliably reduce sycophancy's influence on users' self-perceived rightness or their willingness to repair the conflict. Our results reveal a gap between AI perception and AI influence: by shifting perception without reducing influence, warning-based interventions may offer a false sense of protection. Addressing the harms of sycophancy will therefore require understanding the specific mechanisms through which it shapes judgment, and improving model behavior itself.
Let's normalize debunking each other
The spread of misinformation has become an epidemic, but information hygiene can help.
We're getting the social media crisis wrong
The bigger problem isn't disinformation. It's degraded democratic publics
If you care about fighting misinformation, strengthening information integrity and safeguarding democracy, you should read this account I've written about the journalist-creator lab my colleagues and I have just delivered in Kenya. Spoiler: it was an absolute success.
What happens when content creators and journalists come together?
www.trust.orgCapturing our Attention by @neillevy.bsky.social "we possess sophisticated capacities of epistemic vigilance, which work reasonably well to distinguish reliable from unreliable information, but ... we do not have parallel defences against attentional capture" > tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.202…
