Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦

New paper 🚨 "Cultural evolution – of the arts". Together with @masonyoungblood.bsky.social we wrote a short paper – half essay, half bibliometric analysis – aiming to describe this emerging research area (1/3) doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Was about to write "current digital age", but immediately slapped myself on the wrist: "It's already the age of AI, gramps!" Ages fly by so fast lately.

A thoughtful article on AI text slop. "We built careers on the ability to say nothing beautifully. Now AI has mastered this entire elaborate science in a single prompt — and practices it better and cheaper than humans ever did." silentroom.media/the-craft/br...

babe wake up, new results just dropped, lda is still great

The chemistry Nobel this year got me remembering what it was like to receive groundbreaking research like Soai's key paper at Nature. Sometimes you knew it; sometimes (as in this case) you didn't. www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/what...

Finished my reviews for one well-known conference. 3 out of 4 submissions were meaningless – because, most likely, AI-generated. But wait, it gets better: most reviews (you can later see others' reviews) are positive (!) because... they *also* look AI-generated. It's gonna be a fun event, no doubt.

This paper sets my personal record for the largest number of co-authors: 33! It explores why people like certain stories and story elements, and was lead by @edgardubourg.bsky.social . Check it out!

Our large-scale study of memorization of books in open-weight LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen) will appear at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling as an oral. We made a website for exploring our results on 200 books and 14 models: books-memorization.github.io

Extremely important for multilingual research!

We've been super busy the past few months getting out some research on the computational analysis of film, so I've put together a page with the highlights. people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dbamman/fil... Some things to call out: 1/7

Remembering when teenage kids were imprisoned for lesser hacking crimes www.ft.com/content/6510...

a PhD position in LLMs, annotations, language and benchmarking @ University of Tartu. please share! digits.ut.ee/join-the-team/

These AI-slop email enquiries from students are so depressing. I am not anti AI, but if you can't be bothered to spend the time to write me an email yourself—you know, just straight up with your brain; old-school style—I don't see why I should spend any time writing back.

Researchers investigated language change by studying Slovotvir, a Ukrainian website where users propose and rank alternatives for foreign-origin words. The site shows that people prefer shorter words, but not necessarily more common words. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/KWGE50ZNzaj

a new paper forthcoming in Social Forces! focusing on the killing of George Floyd & the BLM, I study the formation of generations, proposing that formative events can create within-cohort differentiation as much as between-cohort differentiation. read here: tkeskinturk.github.io/imprinting.pdf

"The problem is that we have made the human conversation the expensive option and the machine conversation free, and we are surprised at what researchers, responding rationally, then choose." So many good points in this article (beautifully written btw) wonkhe.com/blogs/the-wa...

Need a historical illustration? Search 1.49 million images from British Library books and Britannica (1500s–1920s). Find similar images, download full-resolution images or transparent PNG cutouts, and explore the sources. huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

New tutorial preprint about simulation-based inference! Shows how to fit a cultural evo model to baby name data using approx Bayesian computation, random forests, and deep learning. Wrote for @eslr.bsky.social but wanted to share with others in @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social! :) osf.io/preprints/so...

Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?

"AI" is everywhere nowadays, but 30 years ago similar hype was about everything "computer". I stumbled at this Italian dictionary from 1986 proudly stating on its cover that words in it were sorted by a computer 😁

Really happy to be a part of this new paper investigating evolutionary forces behind word popularity. It relies on unique & rich data of Ukrainian language 🇺🇦 The project was led by @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social, who used an innovative extension of ABC and did an impressive job overall. Check it out!

Is there an ecology of languages? Can physics help to understand their universal properties? Yes. As species, they rise and fall, become extinct, evolve & compete. Here's our paper @royalsocietypublishing.org @brigan.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/1004.4528 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Why are younger children so good at learning new skills? One reason may be that they are better at a fundamental cognitive mechanism: statistical learning. We followed the same children from age 7 to 14 and found that this learning gradually decreases as they grow older. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation with @damianblasi.bsky.social about linguistic diversity and what it can tell us. Linguistic diversity is a precious part of our species' heritage. It also offers a wellspring of clues about history, culture, and the human mind. Listen: disi.org/the-natural-...

🎉 New paper (and data) on editorial & peer review at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. With a wonderful team! @samzhang.bsky.social, @nicklaberge.bsky.social, Quinten and @aaronclauset.bsky.social. 1/ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

If you would like to teach theoretical modeling skills to your psychology or cognitive science students, or would like to learn these skills yourself, check out our open online textbook: computationalcognitivescience.github.io/lovelace/

New preprint with @carigol.bsky.social and @jstubbersfield.bsky.social on AI/cultural evolution. Three LLMs models (Mistral 7B, Qwen2.5 7B, GPT-3.5) select and mutate short health-advice statements over 100 steps of transmission-chain.

New preprint! We investigate the role of language in the transmission of mental models in cultural evolution. Using a transmission chain design with over 2000 participants, we show that only language allows for the transmission and refinement of mental models. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new study with @benmpeter.bsky.social is now on biorxiv! Here we present a new computational tool which makes it possible to conduct population genetic analyses from very contaminated and very low quality archaic human genomes. (1/7)

So here we go then: the result of many years thinking about how dinosaurs make science and the imagination work together. It's written for both literary critics and scientists and my dearest hope is that it will help foster an academy where we talk to each other more

As I expected, unfortunately... Quantitative historical research must face its data-quality problems (which repeat over and over again)

This pattern often noticed for cars seems to hold also for furniture... from: europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/how-col...

Reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time, having revelations. Revelation #1: In 1890s, travel from London to Amsterdam took only half a day. Because trains! #2 (more shocking): It was possible to send telegrams on and off a train! Not much different from modern-day travel or texting!

What an amazing map! Sadly, right now I'm in the Desert of this is Never Gonna be Over 😅

Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Kudos to @science.org for this self-analysis of the peer review process. These kind of data are never shared and don't have to be. Wildly refreshing to see it out in the open. Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...

Gladstone et al (2026): "biographies of female scientists disproportionately emphasized effort even after adjusting for the obstacles they faced, consistent with stereotypes attributing women’s success to hard work over talent." 🧪 #psychscisky

How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @science.org www.science.org/eprint/QDZNY....

Cool new paper about correcting the biases in cultural data using methods from ecology. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

Wow, looking forward to this! And such a cool cover 🔥

our new paper with @plechac.bsky.social puts thousands of poems across languages in one shared space of poetic form! we use sequence alignment on rhyme schemes to investigate 'fixed forms' and all things between: not only 'sonnets', but 'sonnet-like' things. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

How do people build new ideas from existing knowledge? By tracking Wikipedia searches, we found that novel ideas emerged when people balanced exploration with exploitation—alternating between distant topics and deep dives into related information.

Freshly out in @pnasnexus.org: "On the transmission of texts: Written cultures as complex systems" The first major publication of project @lostma.bsky.social , where we lay down our methodology for studying the transmission, evolution or disparition of texts. /1 #science 🧪

CES postdoc and PhD alert! 🚨