Congratulations to
@joon_s_pk
and team on the
#UIST2023
Best Paper Award for Generative Agents!
Happily, we already know that the agents can throw a party in celebration.
My TED Talk from October 2023 is live!
I talked about generative agents, and what their power to simulate ourselves and our societies will mean for us in the future. Here is the message I ended with: 🧵
I am honored to be named a 2022 Microsoft Research PhD Fellow!
Thank you so much to my advisers,
@msbernst
and
@percyliang
, as well as
@merrierm
,
@kkarahal
, and everyone who shaped me as a researcher. I'm really excited to continue exploring the intersection of HCI and AI!
At Microsoft Research, we aim to empower the next generation of computing related research talent. Today, we're thrilled to announce and congratulate this year's Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship recipients from around the world. Meet the 2022 recipients:
On that note, I’m thrilled to share that I will be joining
@Stanford
to pursue my PhD in computer science this fall!! I’m really looking forward to working with
@msbernst
and all the colleagues in the department (and seeing everyone in the Bay Area)!
For those interested in generative agents (aka the Stanford Smallville experiment), I will be speaking at
#TEDAI2023
this October about simulating human behavior using LLMs and other foundation models, and what this will enable us to do.
Our new research estimates that *one in twenty* comments on Reddit are violations of its norms: anti-social behaviors that most subreddits try to moderate. But almost none are moderated.
🧵 on my upcoming
#cscw2022
paper w/
@josephseering
and
@msbernst
:
Hi
#CHI2022
!! I'm flying to New Orleans tomorrow to join everyone for the in-person conference! Looking forward to catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Please say hi if you want to chat about HCIxNLP, social computing systems, or anything else! See you there :)
I will be presenting generative agents during the "Beyond Words" session (the first session starting at 11am) today at
#UIST2023
. Hope many of you will be able to join our session!
Meanwhile, here is our demo simulation of 25 agents in Smallville:
Hi
#CSCW2022
! I will be presenting our new paper w/
@kkarahal
@niloufar_s
and
@meslami2
on designing socio-technical processes in the context of power dynamics and value conflicts today at 8 pm PT, and on Friday, November 18 at 8 am PT!
Excited to share our new report on the opportunities and risks of
#foundationmodels
(e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3)!
I led the HCI section, §2.5 “Interaction”, which explores how foundation models could affect the way we develop and interact with AI-infused applications 🧵 (1/11):
NEW: This comprehensive report investigates foundation models (e.g. BERT, GPT-3), which are engendering a paradigm shift in AI. 100+ scholars across 10 departments at Stanford scrutinize their capabilities, applications, and societal consequences.
Hi everyone! We are looking for participants with content moderation or community design experience for testing our new AI-powered tool for prototyping social media (1-2hr for $50). Please sign up below if interested. Looking forward to you joining!
I reached a personal milestone of depositing my master's thesis on the role of response time in human-algorithm interaction at
@IllinoisCS
!! I’m deeply grateful to my amazing adviser
@kkarahal
for making the past two years truly fun and meaningful.
I am really excited for our upcoming workshop at
#UIST2023
: Architecting Novel Interactions with Generative AI! Join us if you are interested in the new forms of interaction that generative AI will enable!
Join us at the upcoming
#UIST2023
workshop, Architecting Novel Interactions with Generative AI Models. Featuring a keynote by Will Wright (creator of The Sims and Simcity) and Lauren Elliot (Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego)!
Really excited that this work was recognized with the Best Paper award at
#CHI2022
!! Congratulations
@mitchellgordon
and excited to have been a part of this effort!
+1!! Thrilled to finally share this work. We hope it will serve as a useful synthesis summarizing the best practices in algorithm auditing. This is for anyone interested in conducting audit studies of algorithmic systems and AI!
💯 Really excited to announce the publication of a longer work on algorithm auditing, with
@joon_s_pk
@RERobertson
@kkarahal
@bowlinearl
@niftyc
, in Foundations & Trends in HCI!
"Auditing Algorithms: Understanding Algorithmic Systems from the Outside In"
Carolyn has been working at the intersection of generative AI, agents, and social sciences. Please look forward to their exciting work as Carolyn continues as a PhD student!
Big congratulations,
@cqzou
!!
super excited to share that I'll soon be starting a PhD in computer science at
@Stanford
, supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and
@NSF
fellowship!!
A personal highlight from this week -- my childhood hero
@violincase
joined a
@StanfordHAI
panel to discuss how AI can augment art and creativity. Thank you for being an inspiration!
#AugmentHAI
Starting soon! 2:30 pm EDT. Live presentation and panel discussion with roboticist Carol Reiley, my co-founder. So excited to be speaking together in this
@Stanford
event!
If you are at
#CHI2022
, please come see
@mitchellgordon
present our work on Jury Learning tomorrow at 9am!! For those of us in NOLA in person, it's the Agents in the Loop session, room 292.
1/n What should ML models do when a dataset’s annotators — the people that models are trying to emulate — disagree? In today’s typical supervised learning pipeline, we model an aggregate pseudo-human, predicting the majority vote label while ignoring annotators who disagree.
I will be presenting our new
#CSCW2022
paper on measuring the prevalence of anti-social behavior online w/
@josephseering
and
@msbernst
later today at 10 pm PT, and on Wednesday, November 16 at 10 am PT! I’m also excited that this paper won the Method Award this year…
Our new research estimates that *one in twenty* comments on Reddit are violations of its norms: anti-social behaviors that most subreddits try to moderate. But almost none are moderated.
🧵 on my upcoming
#cscw2022
paper w/
@josephseering
and
@msbernst
:
Our paper led by Vinay Koshy, and together with
@a2975667
and
@kkarahal
on passenger user perspectives in smart homes won a
#CHI2021
best paper honorable mention award!! Congratulations to the amazing team!
@venturetwins
We write these papers in the hope of inspiring future thinkers and builders, so it's always humbling and deeply gratifying to hear this. Thank you,
@venturetwins
!
1. Please find our open-source repo here:
We hope our community can build on this to improve generative agents. There are also many open-source projects (e.g., from
@LangChainAI
) that implement the core ideas from our work, and… (3/14)
We're organizing a workshop on personalization of Gen-AI at Malta.
Submit and attend to immerse in the first principled town-square for conversations surrounding your favorite topics.
Website:
Submission:
Please join
@MinaLee__
’s talk on CoAuthor at
#CHI2022
!! Starting at 3:15 today — it’s room 286-287 in the Natural Language session for those in person!
CoAuthor: Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset
#CHI2022
👩🦰🤖 CoAuthor captures rich interactions between 63 writers and GPT-3 across 1445 writing sessions
Paper & dataset (replay):
Joint work with
@percyliang
@fabulousQian
🙌
I’m excited to share that our paper that explores how age is represented in AI data sets will appear at
#AIES2021
! I will look forward to joining everyone at the conference. And thank you
@merrierm
@msbernst
@_rnbrewer
and
@ecekamar
for being incredible mentors!
I'm now also on my way to
#uist2022
! Looking forward to seeing everyone there!! As Merrie mentioned, I will be presenting our work on social simulacra this Wednesday -- I hope many of you will be able to join our session!
Meanwhile, here is a demo:
On my way to
#uist2022
- on Wednesday
@joon_s_pk
will present our paper on Social Simulacra, which explores using GPT-3 to prototype social technologies.
Thank you
@niftyc
,
@kkarahal
,
@bowlinearl
and
@amislove
!! This is an important victory for anyone studying the impact of algorithmic/AI systems and I know how much work this lawsuit has been. Super proud :)
"In a major victory for civil liberties and civil rights enforcement...a federal court has ruled that research aimed at uncovering whether online algorithms result in racial, gender, or other discrimination does not violate the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act"
+1 to what Karrie mentioned -- it was great to catch up with everyone in the community and join the discussions! Thank you so much
@amyxzh
@andresmh
@msbernst
for organizing the summer camp :)
Thank you to
@amyxzh
@andresmh
@msbernst
and all the Social Computing Systems Summer camp attendees for the opportunities to discuss our community's pressing needs, goals, and for creating an environment to connect.
Really excited to share our work on emotional amplification during live-streaming led by
@mufanluo
, and together with Tiffany Hsu and
@jeffhancock
!
#CSCW2020
Check out our new paper at
#CSCW
- "Emotional Amplification During Live-Streaming: Evidence from Comments During and After News Events" with Tiffany Hsu,
@joon_s_pk
and
@jeffhancock
! Thanks for all the questions from the virtual audiences!
.
Generative agents, to me, are like portraits that illustrate our images. Just as well-crafted portraits can deepen our understanding and appreciation for the reality they represent, I believe the power of generative agents to simulate our lives may help us... (2/6)
I highly recommend catching
@lindsaypopowski
at
#CHI2022
-- she is an amazing social computing researcher with tons of interesting ideas about online communities and self-representation. I learned a lot from her as we were collaborating this year.
Jokes aside, I’ll be flying out to NOLA for
#chi2022
tomorrow! Looking forward to seeing old and new faces!! My keywords (😉): social computing systems, online communities, digital self-representation; happy to chat about those & more or commiserate about the first year!
What if we could generate an unbounded number of synthetic users and the social interactions between them that can realistically reflect how actual users might behave in our system designs?
Social simulacra lets you do that. (4/10)
You can see some of its generated behaviors—posts, replies, trolls—in our demo here:
E.g., say you are creating a new community for discussing a StarWar game with a few rules. Given this description, our tool generated a simulacrum like this: (2/10)
So I am excited to see how generative agents, originally conceived as game NPCs, might contribute to defining a new class of interactive applications (e.g., immersive environments, rehearsal spaces for communications, and simulations for testing social theories). (7/14)
2. What are exciting application areas for generative agents? Obviously, I am excited about the future of games -- generative agents may unlock new forms of gameplay that were previously impossible. Here is a thoughtful article by
@Tocelot
: (5/14)
Finally, if you want to learn more about our work beyond what is available here, some of my talks on generative agents are publicly available (e.g., at UC Berkeley in early April: , and most recently at London ML: ). (12/14)
Thank you to
@msbernst
and
@percyliang
, who are more than just advisers; they have shaped me as a researcher, and contributed to envisioning this work as my partners. And thank you to my long-time mentors,
@merrierm
and
@kkarahal
, who continue to help me grow in this field. (6/6)
And thank you to all my friends and colleagues. This seems like the perfect opportunity to also give big shout-outs to
@dmetaxak
and
@meslami2
who guided me in the trenches, and
@landay
and
@jeffhancock
who supported me as I got started in the business of doing HCI research.
But looking beyond, I see that historically, games also served as powerful testbeds for technical breakthroughs. Not surprisingly, cognitive architectures built by the founders of my field (e.g., Newell and Simon) and influenced our work, found their home in game NPCs. (6/14)
Really excited and proud to hear this!! Liza is an amazing student I had the pleasure of mentoring with
@kkarahal
and
@RanjithaSKumar
at
@IllinoisCS
last summer -- please look out for all the great things she will do at Berkeley!
Incredibly humbled and excited to announce I’ll be pursuing my PhD at the
@BerkeleyISchool
starting this fall! Looking forward to California sunshine 🌟🐻
A few acknowledgments:
To me, generative agents was a project that was only possible at the intersection of two fields: human-computer interaction and natural language processing. I am grateful to
@StanfordHCI
and
@StanfordNLP
for nurturing and fostering this idea. (13/14)
So happy that we can finally share this! I’m excited to hear what y’all think about social simulacra and see where these kinds of tools can go! (And thank you, Joon, for letting me join and have such a fun first project of grad school!)
Why are these useful? In social computing design, understanding our design decisions’ impact is hard since many challenges do not arise until a system is populated by *many*. Think about: newcomers with unintentional norm-breaking, trolling, or other antisocial behaviors (3/10)
There are undeniable opportunities that foundation models bring but also risks. We believe these are highly interdisciplinary questions that are important to recognize and work on as a community. I'm glad that
#HCI
is at the table in this article. (10/11)
One more thank you to my collaborator on this work,
@josephseering
, and my advisor,
@msbernst
. And thank you to all the volunteer content moderators who are engaged in an extremely important, yet challenging task on behalf of their communities. (13/13)
What power social simulacra are LLMs (e.g., GPT-3). We observe that their training data has a wide range of social behavior & they can generate compelling simulacra of possible interactions w/ proper prompting. This lets us ask “what if” questions to iterate on our design. (5/10)
Finally, though I was the one on the stage sharing this work, an incredible community of people supported and shaped my past four years as a PhD student, leading up to this point. So I would like to extend a few special thank yous. (5/6)
3. What will future systems look like with LLMs? We are at an interesting point in computing history. LLMs and other foundation models have become powerful enough to give us a chance to realize our long-standing goals, such as fully general human-like agents. (8/14)
We are already seeing early forms of foundation model-powered applications (e.g. GitHub Copilot powered by OpenAI Codex). I expect that we will see strong growth of work in the vein of PixelTone, CommandSpace, Screen2Vec, CodeMend, and The Elements of Fashion Style. (5/11)
We measured this by designing a human-AI pipeline that identifies these norm violations at scale, and a bootstrap estimation procedure to quantify measurement uncertainty. Our measurement covers two periods: (1) 2016, and (2) 2020–21. (4/13)
The adaptability of foundation models through natural language prompts may relax this conflict by lowering the threshold (Myers, Hudson, and Pausch 2000), potentially enough for anyone to prototype their own AI models—tightening that iterative loop. (3/11)
Probably the right conversation to have here involves the need for massive shifts in how we envision these systems. Can we look beyond social media’s predominant role as a public square to one where reachability can co-exist with a stronger sense of shared norms? (11/13)
... the need for a close collaboration with social computing stakeholders and accountability measures/evaluation techniques such as auditing to ensure that our prototyping approach is used for its intended purpose—empowering online communities—and not for auto-trolling. (9/10)
In threads of this genre, I usually summarize the technical contribution of our work, but I've noticed that others have already done that well. So instead, I will offer three updates/reflections on generative agents. (2/14)
It was wonderful to present my new research with
@rbrbr5
,
@AlexKirlik
, and
@kkarahal
yesterday at
#CSCW2019
! For those who couldn’t make it to the talk, check out our work on slow algorithms here:
So far, the vast amount of data, computing resources, and skills needed to create a functional task-specific model were frequently in conflict with the iterative prototyping process. (2/11)
📢 Intelligent & Interactive Writing Assistants Workshop ()
#In2Writing
#ACL2022
We invite NLP and HCI researchers as well as industry practitioners and professional writers to build, improve, and evaluate AI-powered writing assistants! 👩🦰🤖✏️
Thank you so much everyone for helping us share the information about our study, and for those who signed up!! We were able to get in touch with the desired number of participants for this study. We are looking forward to sharing our findings with the community soon!
In an "important victory for civil rights," today the US Supreme Court ruled that journalists & computing researchers who investigate online platforms aren't criminal hackers who exceed "authorized access." They cited... well... us! Also it's my birthday.
@QVeraLiao
@ZiangXiao
Yes!! We should absolutely do this! I think Kristen told me she is coming as well a few days ago..? (though I might be totally misremembering) I can start a thread later today :)
I also learned a lot from
@_rnbrewer
while collaborating with her on our AIES paper. Really looking forward to all the cool things Robin will do during her year at Google PAIR!
New PAIR Medium post with
@_rnbrewer
on how ML and AI might improve user experiences for people with disabilities.
I personally learned a lot from this Q&A and I hope others will too.
*So what does this all mean?*
For social computing designers, this means they can design “proactively.” Participating designers in our study said that they are in the practice of reactive design, implementing interventions only after a dumpster fire damages the community. (6/10)
Foundation models will also amplify questions the HCI community has already been asking. e.g. How will AI affect our trust in one another in AI-mediated comm? Who's the author of the AI-generated content? What happens when AI misbehaves and disappoints users & communities? (6/11)
To me, the challenge is reminiscent of those faced before in computing. Though computers are powerful, it was developments such as object-oriented programming, the MVC design pattern, and operating systems that enabled truly complex and useful interactive applications. (10/14)
@TobyJLi
@yuwen_lu_
@zhangchaodesign
Fascinating!! Yes, let's find some time to chat -- would love to hear more about the cool things that you, Yuwen, and Zhang have been working on and share what we learned!
@groceryheist
@josephseering
@msbernst
Thanks for the question! Short answer -- it is, for a number of reasons. 1) We *would not have known* that they were so common prior to running the study. The number could have been 0.1% -- that's why we run these study.