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The continuing, explosive developments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), built on large language models and related algorithms, has led to much excitement and speculation about the potential impact of this new technology.…
The knowledge gap hypothesis suggests that the diffusion of information tends to increase rather than reduce social inequalities. Subsequent research on the digital divide has extended this perspective by focusing on unequal access to and…
The chapter discusses the foundational impact of modern generative AI models on information access (IA) systems. In contrast to traditional AI, the large-scale training and superior data modeling of generative AI models enable them to…
Traditionally, cognitive and computer scientists have viewed intelligence solipsistically, as a property of unitary agents devoid of social context. Given the success of contemporary learning algorithms, we argue that the bottleneck in…
Life finds a way. For sessile organisms like plants, the need to adapt to changes in the environment is even more poignant. For humanity, the need to develop crops that can grow in diverse environments and feed our growing population is an…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on GenAI ideas. We study the causal impact of GenAI on the…
Natural selection can create information. In particular, because of the action of natural selection, we can often learn something about an environment by examining local organisms, and vice versa. For example, the characteristics of a…
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI is fundamentally transforming information retrieval and processing on the Internet, bringing both great potential and significant concerns regarding content authenticity and…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
The recent explosion of "foundation" generative AI models has been built upon the extensive extraction of value from online sources, often without corresponding reciprocation. This pattern mirrors and intensifies the extractive practices of…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Information theory is gaining popularity as a tool to characterize performance of biological systems. However, information is commonly quantified without reference to whether or how a system could extract and use it; as a result,…
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is driving significant environmental impacts. The rapid development and deployment of increasingly larger algorithmic models capable of analysing vast amounts of data are contributing to rising…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
We conducted in-person ethnography in India and the US to investigate how young people (18-24) trusted online content, just as generative AI (genAI) became mainstream. We found that when online, how participants determined what content to…
Seeding strategies for influence maximization in social networks have been studied for more than a decade. They have mainly relied on the activation of all resources (seeds) simultaneously in the beginning; yet, it has been shown that…
We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such…
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is transforming how firms create, process, and apply knowledge, yet little is known about the heterogeneity of its productivity effects across users. We report results from a randomized controlled…
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how health content is encountered and acted upon across both the information and healthcare ecosystems. AI systems now generate claims, curate information, interpret symptoms, synthesize…