Generative AI (GAI) technologies are disrupting professional writing, challenging traditional practices. Recent studies explore GAI adoption experiences of creative practitioners, but we know little about how these experiences evolve into established practices and how GAI resistance alters these practices. To address this gap, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with writing professionals who adopted and/or resisted GAI. Using the theoretical lens of Job Crafting, we identify four strategies professionals employ to reshape their roles. Writing professionals employed GAI resisting strategies to maximize human potential, reinforce professional identity, carve out a professional niche, and preserve credibility within their networks. In contrast, GAI-enabled strategies allowed writers who embraced GAI to enhance desirable workflows, minimize mundane tasks, and engage in new AI-managerial labor. These strategies amplified their collaborations with GAI while reducing their reliance on other people. We conclude by discussing implications of GAI practices on writers' identity and practices as well as crafting theory.

Queer people are often discussed as targets of bias, harm, or discrimination in research on generative AI. However, the specific ways that queer people engage with generative AI, and thus possible uses that support queer people, have yet to be explored. We conducted a workshop study with 13 queer artists, during which we gave participants access to GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 and facilitated group sensemaking activities. We found our participants struggled to use these models due to various normative values embedded in their designs, such as hyper-positivity and anti-sexuality. We describe various strategies our participants developed to overcome these models' limitations and how, nevertheless, our participants found value in these highly-normative technologies. Drawing on queer feminist theory, we discuss implications for the conceptualization of "state-of-the-art" models and consider how FAccT researchers might support queer alternatives.

We present Auspex - a threat modeling system built using a specialized collection of generative artificial intelligence-based methods that capture threat modeling tradecraft. This new approach, called tradecraft prompting, centers on encoding the on-the-ground knowledge of threat modelers within the prompts that drive a generative AI-based threat modeling system. Auspex employs tradecraft prompts in two processing stages. The first stage centers on ingesting and processing system architecture information using prompts that encode threat modeling tradecraft knowledge pertaining to system decomposition and description. The second stage centers on chaining the resulting system analysis through a collection of prompts that encode tradecraft knowledge on threat identification, classification, and mitigation. The two-stage process yields a threat matrix for a system that specifies threat scenarios, threat types, information security categorizations and potential mitigations. Auspex produces formalized threat model output in minutes, relative to the weeks or months a manual process takes. More broadly, the focus on bespoke tradecraft prompting, as opposed to fine-tuning or agent-based add-ons, makes Auspex a lightweight, flexible, modular, and extensible foundational system capable of addressing the complexity, resource, and standardization limitations of both existing manual and automated threat modeling processes. In this connection, we establish the baseline value of Auspex to threat modelers through an evaluation procedure based on feedback collected from cybersecurity subject matter experts measuring the quality and utility of threat models generated by Auspex on real banking systems. We conclude with a discussion of system performance and plans for enhancements to Auspex.

Recent technological advances popularized the use of image generation among the general public. Crafting effective prompts can, however, be difficult for novice users. To tackle this challenge, we developed PromptMap, a new interaction style for text-to-image AI that allows users to freely explore a vast collection of synthetic prompts through a map-like view with semantic zoom. PromptMap groups images visually by their semantic similarity, allowing users to discover relevant examples. We evaluated PromptMap in a between-subject online study ($n=60$) and a qualitative within-subject study ($n=12$). We found that PromptMap supported users in crafting prompts by providing them with examples. We also demonstrated the feasibility of using LLMs to create vast example collections. Our work contributes a new interaction style that supports users unfamiliar with prompting in achieving a satisfactory image output.

There is an increasing imperative to anticipate and understand the performance and safety of generative AI systems in real-world deployment contexts. However, the current evaluation ecosystem is insufficient: commonly used static benchmarks face validity challenges, and ad hoc case-by-case approaches rarely scale. In this piece, we advocate for maturing an evaluation science for generative AI systems. While generative AI creates unique challenges for system safety engineering and measurement science, the field can draw valuable insights from the development of safety evaluation practices in other fields including transportation, aerospace, and pharmaceutical engineering. In particular, we present three key lessons: evaluation metrics must be applicable to real-world performance, metrics must be iteratively refined, and evaluation institutions and norms must be established. Applying these insights, we outline a concrete path toward a more rigorous approach for evaluating generative AI systems.

Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more. In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled "Effective Accelerationism", which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that "the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness" was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts. Effective accelerationism, or "e/acc", exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing "doomers" to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk. In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc's focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress.

In recent years, the exceptional performance of generative models in generative tasks has sparked significant interest in their integration into decision-making processes. Due to their ability to handle complex data distributions and their strong model capacity, generative models can be effectively incorporated into decision-making systems by generating trajectories that guide agents toward high-reward state-action regions or intermediate sub-goals. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the application of generative models in decision-making tasks. We classify seven fundamental types of generative models: energy-based models, generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, normalizing flows, diffusion models, generative flow networks, and autoregressive models. Regarding their applications, we categorize their functions into three main roles: controllers, modelers and optimizers, and discuss how each role contributes to decision-making. Furthermore, we examine the deployment of these models across five critical real-world decision-making scenarios. Finally, we summarize the strengths and limitations of current approaches and propose three key directions for advancing next-generation generative directive models: high-performance algorithms, large-scale generalized decision-making models, and self-evolving and adaptive models.

It has been roughly three years since the open-source release of Stable Diffusion ignited a Generative AI (GenAI) boom [Bengesi et al., 2023]. The proliferation of these technologies has since reshaped design practice and research. From early ideation to final implementation, these developments have significantly altered how design work is conceived, conducted, and evaluated [Hou et al., 2024]. This essay examines the critical juncture at which the design research community finds itself, seeking to understand and shape these developments while grappling with their implications for creative practice, design education, and professional identities. Popular discourse around GenAI often centers on simplified unequivocal narratives: AI as a threat to humanity, as a solution to global challenges, as a force of disruption, or as a replacement for humans [Gilardi et al., 2024]. While these narratives have sparked debate and interest, they can function as "semantic stopsigns"--conceptual framings that oversimplify complex issues, providing an illusion of resolution that hinders deeper inquiry [LessWrong Community, n.d., Lifton, 1961]. For instance, claims like "AI is unreliable" can lead to outright dismissal of its potential,

The purpose of this study is to assess how large language models (LLMs) can be used for fact-checking and contribute to the broader debate on the use of automated means for veracity identification. To achieve this purpose, we use AI auditing methodology that systematically evaluates performance of five LLMs (ChatGPT 4, Llama 3 (70B), Llama 3.1 (405B), Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini) using prompts regarding a large set of statements fact-checked by professional journalists (16,513). Specifically, we use topic modeling and regression analysis to investigate which factors (e.g. topic of the prompt or the LLM type) affect evaluations of true, false, and mixed statements. Our findings reveal that while ChatGPT 4 and Google Gemini achieved higher accuracy than other models, overall performance across models remains modest. Notably, the results indicate that models are better at identifying false statements, especially on sensitive topics such as COVID-19, American political controversies, and social issues, suggesting possible guardrails that may enhance accuracy on these topics. The major implication of our findings is that there are significant challenges for using LLMs for factchecking, including significant variation in performance across different LLMs and unequal quality of outputs for specific topics which can be attributed to deficits of training data. Our research highlights the potential and limitations of LLMs in political fact-checking, suggesting potential avenues for further improvements in guardrails as well as fine-tuning.

This paper introduces JurisTCU, a Brazilian Portuguese dataset for legal information retrieval (LIR). The dataset is freely available and consists of 16,045 jurisprudential documents from the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts, along with 150 queries annotated with relevance judgments. It addresses the scarcity of Portuguese-language LIR datasets with query relevance annotations. The queries are organized into three groups: real user keyword-based queries, synthetic keyword-based queries, and synthetic question-based queries. Relevance judgments were produced through a hybrid approach combining LLM-based scoring with expert domain validation. We used JurisTCU in 14 experiments using lexical search (document expansion methods) and semantic search (BERT-based and OpenAI embeddings). We show that the document expansion methods significantly improve the performance of standard BM25 search on this dataset, with improvements exceeding 45% in P@10, R@10, and nDCG@10 metrics when evaluating short keyword-based queries. Among the embedding models, the OpenAI models produced the best results, with improvements of approximately 70% in P@10, R@10, and nDCG@10 metrics for short keyword-based queries, suggesting that these dense embeddings capture semantic relationships in this domain, surpassing the reliance on lexical terms. Besides offering a dataset for the Portuguese-language IR research community, suitable for evaluating search systems, the results also contribute to enhancing a search system highly relevant to Brazilian citizens.