Gordon Pennycook

Thanks, Ed!

When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

Finally realized who Bessent reminds me of

Standing on the Shoulders of Termites Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love AI (scientists)

I saw we were fighting about what AI will do to (social) science.

I have some thoughts (originally written for a book on scientific inquiry) and decided to turn them into my first substack article. Co-written with Nat Rabb!

tomstello.substack.com/p/standing-o...

Today's SJDM Featured Paper is:

Costello, T. H., Pelrine, K., Kowal, M., Arechar, A. A., Godbout, J.-F., Gleave, A., Rand, D., & Pennycook, G. (2026). Large language models can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies. arXiv. doi.org/10.48550/arX...

It's hard to look at things like this and not see a country headed toward some form of collapse.

Lawless authoritarianism:
-"How Trump Keeps Withholding Money After Being Sued 198 Times"
-"Officials Violated More Than 50 Court Orders in NJ"
-"ICE violated at least 96 court orders in January"
-"The judge then provided an additional count of 113 more court orders violated in 77 more cases"

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2007, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2017, the US president was born in 1946.

And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

Trump's "strong approval" has hovered between 20-25% since July, but more of the remaining 75% are moving toward "strong disapproval" since then. Although his base support is solid and unwavering, there is still plenty of room for stronger opposition to his agenda.

These hearings better outlast Benghazi.

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Woah! Not good...

it’s also all related. the men who traffic children with impunity are the same ones who start wars, bomb schools, support genocide, ignore laws, shirk taxes, beat their wives and children, and steal every dollar they can from the people. it’s all an expression of the same belief: no one else matters

I see that this song is relevant again

"To save you WE MAY HAVE TO KILL YOU!
For freedom YOU MAY HAVE TO DIE!
#1 at liberation
liberating life from bodies, helping spirits fly...
Freedom from... LIFE!"

youtu.be/3nSwT1G8eCs?...

Clippy says: Look's like you're trying to start a global thermonuclear war. Would you like me to decide when to launch?

You sound like an unhinged person if you in plain words describe what’s happening, but the Trump admin demanded Anthropic’s AI be able to kill things for it w/out human approval and also do mass surveillance.

Anthropic said no, and now the admin is trying to destroy the company in retaliation.

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for an Ellison Takeover

The richest man owns X.

The second and third richest men control Google.

The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.

And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.

See the problem here?

What happens now that the Ellisons will have both CBS News, plus CNN?
*Dems could set out a populist anti-trust platform for the next election
*Desperate need for new independent media sources - follow nonprofit or other models
What else?

percent of sentences in state of the union addresses since carter that express grievances. HUGE spikes for trump. 12% in 2020, 11% in 2026

a striking chart

www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

This is fantastic, thank you!

Please tell me that someone is keeping a comprehensive list of all the Trump outrages? Just today we have:

-DOJ illegally removed allegations against Trump from Epstein file release

-Trump staffer is running an ostensibly authentic pro-trump Twitter account

-ICE abandoned blind man who later died

"The president had DOJ illegally cover up documents about allegations he sexually assaulted a child after Congress specifically passed a law requiring they be disclosed" is, in and of itself, enough to merit rapid removal from office regardless of how true or credible the underlying allegation is.

Wired has been doing consistently excellent reporting during Trump's second term. I suggest subscribing!

In the words of Alfred E. Newman... CHEAP!

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc.

One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole.

to explain:

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)!

How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science.

Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...

New paper in Current Directions in Psych Science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

After countless arguments about what tasks ppl should/should not offload to AI, we instead argue that genAI can be used *augment* research protocols in novel ways. I.e. use AI to make better psych experiments!

We made an extremely uncontroversial argument, in my view... but I guess we'll see, lol