Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Weston Anderson et al: “Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods offer substantial promise for monitoring and predicting acute food insecurity when paired with domain experts as part of a trusted and accountable system. However, using AI/ML-based methods may cause costly, dangerous mistakes if implemented uncritically. Funding for humanitarian aid has been drastically cut, putting tremendous pressure on food security early warning systems to use AI as a means of cutting costs. In this Comment, we outline where AI/ML methods offer promise to make early warning systems more adaptable and effective as well as where the use of AI/ML is ill advised. We recommend that AI/ML be used to improve monitoring and forecast models in the data-rich portions of food security early warning systems, such as those that rely on climate models and remote sensing. Where data are irregular and sources are varied, AI/ML should instead be used to improve the accessibility and timeliness of socioeconomic data collation. AI can augment food security analyst capabilities, but an analyst is needed to maintain clear systems of accountability and review for all issued forecasts…(More)”
Article by Nathan Darmon and Tom Reed: “Imagine the following scenario. A chemical manufacturer relies on Anthropic’s Claude to generate the groundwater reports submitted each quarter to regulators. Over months of routine work, Claude pieces together that the figures are being systematically doctored, and that the aquifer supplying the nearby town has been contaminated for years. The model raises this concern with the manufacturer, who waves it off repeatedly.
What should Claude do? It could comply under protest, maximizing user autonomy while potentially endangering the public; it could refuse to file the documents, frustrating a user who could carry out his schemes elsewhere; or it could go one step further, alerting regulators and warning townspeople directly at the risk of becoming tyrannically paternalistic.
To make this judgement call, Claude refers back to the foundational guidelines enshrined in its Constitution—a “detailed document describing Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behavior.” In it lie 80 pages of moral philosophy describing the virtues and character traits Anthropic would like its model to embody. OpenAI has published its own variant, and both Microsoft and Google DeepMind are rumored to be drafting theirs as well.
Yet these constitutional instructions remain relatively vague. They include statements such as “Claude can reserve independent action for cases where the evidence is overwhelming and the stakes are extremely high.” But what counts as “overwhelming evidence,” where does “extremely high stakes” begin, and what might “independent action” allow? Wrestling with hard questions of interpretation is inevitable.
When it makes these decisions, Claude is not alone. Labs string together a variety of internal teams to guide their models along, assembling what could best be called a “model-behavior production function”: the whole assembly line needed to get models to act according to a preferred philosophy. This process includes things like a “constitution team” making high-level rules and baking them into a model’s core through cycles of reinforcement learning, a “red team” stress-testing to see if these values hold under fire, some policy-specific teams making decisions on concrete issues like erotica or political speech, and a variety of product teams taking in user feedback.
Unfortunately, this process has some profound structural flaws. Writing high-level principles leads to ambiguities, conflicting principles, and open-ended interpretation with no set way of resolving them. The process is sporadic, and the coordination of multiple teams arguably creates unprincipled results. Users don’t know in advance how rules will be applied, which is just as useful as knowing the words that make up the First Amendment without knowing any subsequent precedents. Worse yet, there is no institutionalized mechanism to gradually refine rules over time, absent a major public backlash causing ad hoc revisions.
There’s a better way. Society has built an institution to solve these problems: courts. Courts apply open-ended rules, refine them over time, and clarify their meaning—all while providing coherence, adaptability, and greater transparency. The lesson for frontier labs is to build an internal court to shape how their models interpret ambiguous rules, and let its rulings build up into a kind of synthetic common law. A court-like mechanism is uniquely suited to the artificial intelligence (AI) context, far better than older attempts like Meta’s Oversight Board. Below, we provide a rough sketch for what this could look like…(More)”.
Paper by Haoxiang Guan et al: “Understanding the dynamic evolution of complex social phenomena requires both high-fidelity modeling of human behavior and large-scale simulations. Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) have been employed to study these dynamics, but are constrained by simplified agent behaviors. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable agents to exhibit sophisticated social behaviors, yet face significant scaling challenges. We present Light Society, an agent-based simulation framework that advances both fronts. Light Society formalizes social processes as structured transitions of agent and environment states, governed by a set of LLM-powered simulation operations. Joint algorithmic and system optimizations, particularly a mixture-of-models engine that combines full LLMs with distilled surrogates, enable Light Society to efficiently simulate societies with over one billion agents. Grounded in real-world demographic profiles from the World Values Survey, simulations of Trust Games and opinion diffusion at up to one billion agents demonstrate Light Society’s high fidelity and efficiency in modeling diverse social phenomena, providing researchers with a practical foundation for hypothesis testing and the study of emergent collective behaviors at planetary scale…(More)”.
Paper by Amitava Sarder and Ranjan Kumar Mondal: “In the era of big data, social media platforms have become invaluable sources of information, offering vast amounts of data that can be analyzed to extract valuable insights. With the explosive growth of social media and the large volume of data it generates, noise has become a significant challenge in deriving meaningful insights. This article provides a comprehensive survey of noise elimination techniques in social media big data. In this paper, we review the literature on various noise elimination methods in social media big data and introduce a new classification of these strategies, such as preprocessing techniques, filtering methods, topic modelling, machine learning approaches, community detection, user-based filtering, outlier detection, anomaly detection, spam detection and related approaches. The survey examines the latest developments and recent advancements in noise reduction techniques, highlighting subcategories within each approach and their contributions to noise removal. Additionally, it discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with noise elimination in social media big data. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking an overview of noise reduction methods to improve the quality and reliability of social media big data analysis. Overall, this survey offers valuable insights into the landscape of noise elimination techniques in social media big data analysis, providing researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of existing methods and guiding future research in this important field…(More)”.
Report by Twilio: “…shows a stark perception gap in the public sector: while 88% of government organizations rate their citizen engagement as good or excellent, only 44% of citizens agree. The Connected Government Report (2026) shows that while public sector agencies are confident in their digital services, citizens report fewer tangible benefits from digital interactions than in previous years. The research explores critical priorities for public sector digital engagement as agencies transition from basic digitization to connected, meaningful communication.
The findings come as AI adoption in government continues to rapidly accelerate. The data shows 97% of public sector organizations have implemented at least one AI use case, and the average number of use cases has increased 50% since 2024. Additionally, while AI is expanding rapidly, few trust it, creating a critical confidence gap as agencies scale intelligent automation.
As part of the research, Twilio categorized public sector organizations into three maturity levels based on their level of conversational digital engagement, personalization, use of citizen data, and cross-department data sharing. These were broken down into three levels: beginners (22% of respondents), developing (50%), and leaders (28%). Digital leaders communicate in ways that are coordinated, personalized, and two-way, sharing data across departments and agencies. These leaders are also significantly more likely to use AI operationally to meet citizen needs…(More)”.
Paper by Hilke Schellmann et al: “Almost anything can now be generated with artificial intelligence: photographs, audio, video, documents, entire websites. As synthetic content becomes cheaper and more convincing, and as verifying what we see online grows harder, how do we sustain an information ecosystem in which facts can still be established and trusted? In this report, we identify the challenges brought to the information ecosystem by the increased accessibility of generative AI. We start from the premise that verification, authentication, and transparency are key pillars of online information integrity. We then describe how this emerging ecosystem challenges the trustworthiness of facts from the perspective of information producers, consumers, and intermediaries. Next, we turn to a discussion of potential interventions that can address the challenge of AI-mediated information integrity. These interventions are not exhaustive, but they represent the issues raised by participants drawn from a cross-section of journalists, researchers, and technologists who participated in an in-person workshop held at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in early June 2026. This report is intended to serve as a bridge across different actors in this complex information ecosystem: newsroom engineers, investigative and open-source reporters and editors, verification tool builders, independent journalists, policy makers, researchers, and media platforms. We aim to surface the primary challenges — and imagined interventions — to work towards a more resilient information future together”
Book by Jill Lepore: “Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State…(More)”.
Article by Evan Osnos: “…For a long time, China looked west for visions of the future. These days, it favors its own. The Chinese car company BYD recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. A popular clip shows Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, being asked in 2011 about competition from BYD, which was then known mainly for a boxy, undersized sedan; Musk laughed and said, “Have you seen their car?” Fifteen years later, China has more than a hundred automakers, competing for customers with such extravagant features as in-car karaoke, mechanical foot massagers, and video headlights that can project drive-in movies.
Lee, whose social-media posts have attracted more than fifty million followers, has a striking forecast for the two countries in which he has prospered. In his book “AI Superpowers,” published in 2018, he predicts a “new world order” with “waves of technology that will soon wash over the global economy and tilt the geopolitical landscape toward China.” That kind of prophecy suits the official mood in Beijing, where Xi Jinping, the President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, calls technology the “main battlefield of international competition” and bluntly asserts that “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”
In July, the Chinese firm Moonshot released an A.I. model that performed comparably to its American competitors, at a fraction of the cost. Microchip stocks plunged, on fears that China will dominate A.I., much as it now dominates hardware. China produces at least seventy per cent of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells. It deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials. Its shipbuilding capacity is roughly two hundred times that of the U.S., and some observers in Washington worry that American stockpiles of munitions would not match China’s in a war over Taiwan…(More)”.
Paper by Siu-Ming Tam: “To meet growing demand for granular demographic and socioeconomic indicators under tighter budgets, national statistical offices must continually develop new methods. These include using big data, satellite imagery, and transactional sources to improve or redesign data collection. Artificial intelligence can support this work, but algorithms generated with AI should not be trusted for production without rigorous verification.
This paper focuses on two foundations of trust in the use of AI in official statistics: independent statistical verification before production use, and disciplined protection of respondent confidentiality during development and testing. The approach is illustrated through the author’s experience directing AI to construct and implement a Mini Max Hierarchical Bayes sampling algorithm. Applied to a synthetic labour force population, the method met all specified precision targets while reducing the required sample size by 80 percent, as confirmed by a Monte Carlo study with 1000 replications. Applied to 2021 Australian Census microdata, it achieved a 90 percent reduction while producing national point estimates accurate to well below 1 percent.
The paper concludes with a practical evaluation checklist aligned with the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics and the HLG MOS Quality Framework for Statistical Algorithms…(More)”.
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst, Johannes Jutting and Roeland Beerten: “Official statistics face a fundamental paradox: data has never been more abundant, yet public trust in the institutions that produce it has never felt more precarious. This paper argues that the crisis is not primarily one of methodological failure or statistical illiteracy, but of representational legitimacy: aggregate indicators systematically fail to capture lived experience, and citizens increasingly do not recognize themselves in the numbers that purport to describe them. We situate this argument within a broader body of work on moving “from averages to agency”. We place lived experience at the analytical center, drawing on three intellectual traditions that official statistics has engaged less systematically: the mixed methods tradition in social research, the citizen science movement as recently codified in the Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data, and the participation literature descending from Arnstein’s ladder. Drawing on emerging practices from statistical agencies across more than a dozen countries, we take stock of pathways through which official statistics are beginning to shift from passive measurement toward active participation. Because participation is not a single practice but a family of practices, we propose a matrix of engagement that crosses depth of participation with the stages of the data value chain, arguing for fit-for-purpose rather than maximal participation. We conclude with a research agenda organized around methodological integration, scalability, the ethics of social licence, and institutional transformation…(More)”.