Eddie Yang

Assistant professor @PurduePolSci. Prev. @UCSDPoliSci @MSFTResearch

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@xuyiqing Thanks, Yiqing!

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@dashunwang Thanks, Dashun! Didn’t get to ring the bell but I’m guessing it’s rung pretty frequently in the lab.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

https://t.co/FCQ2H6OYLX

[Brandon Stewart @b_m_stewart]

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

https://t.co/TqTLSCY74l

[Sol Messing @SolomonMg]

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies w 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Simon Johnson and I are hiring a postdoc at MIT to research the history, social implications, and future of technology. The job description and application link are available here: https://t.co/wTZaAuy1wr

[Yiqing Xu @xuyiqing]

I’m hiring a predoc starting this summer. The focus is building AI workflows to improve research efficiency.

More importantly, I value independent thinking and ambition. You do not need to fit into a narrow topic.

If you’re interested in applied statistics, causal inference, or Chinese politics, broadly defined, plz apply. You can propose your own project --- I will support it.

https://t.co/GFYCuBj1Gu

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@lockhartm excel formula okay?

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@rexhere1 Thanks, Rex!

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

New paper at AJPS: "The limits of AI for authoritarian control." The more repression there is, the less information exists in AI's training data, and the worse the AI performs. Ironically, data from democracies can help improve repressive AI.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@xuyiqing Point well taken. I hope the intuition is still a useful baseline for people to work with.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@jcanfil Thanks, Justin!

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@minjulisettekim Thanks, Minju!

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@raphpfei Fair point. It will partly depend on how much people change how they talk about things in light of new technologies. LLMs replicate but it was late in the review process n hard to change the entire paper.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@twittwoods will do next time!

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.

These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@ML_Burn For comparison����

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@ML_Burn Anh Nguyen made this nice table of published work in political science.

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@vshih2 Commercial media are increasingly paywalled. Propaganda will always be free :)

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

@lockhartm Maybe @RefineInk can acquire Yiqing and Leo? They need to file a patent now.