arXiv AI

Mapping the Emerging Social Science of Large Language Models

The paper maps the nascent social‑science literature on large language models (LLMs) by analysing 198 curated papers and 47,719 field‑scale papers. It identifies three main domains—LLM as Social Minds, LLM Societies, and LLM‑Human Interactions—each containing 13 subcategories such as reasoning, bias, collective intelligence, and trust. The taxonomy is validated through clustering stability, author classification agreement, and topic mapping, revealing differing prominence across conference and journal venues.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to assist writing, but this study shows they alter both tone and meaning of human text. A user study found that heavy LLM use increased neutral essays by nearly 70% and made writers feel less creative and less in their voice. Even when prompted to make only grammar edits, LLMs changed the semantic content of essays and produced AI-generated scientific reviews that were less focused on clarity and significance and scored higher on average.

By Marwa Abdulhai, Isadora White, Yanming Wan, Ibrahim Qureshi, Joel Z. Leibo, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Natasha Jaques
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC): An Open Tool and Reproducible Pipeline for Analyzing Social Group Discourse at Scale

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC) is an open, modular corpus comprising over 527 million English‑language Reddit posts from 2007 to 2023, curated for relevance to six social group distinctions—race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone. A multi‑step, human‑audited filtering pipeline keeps irrelevant content below 10% overall and per group, while each post receives algorithmic annotations of user home region and a suite of validated semantic labels such as moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. ISAAC’s publicly available, reproducible pipeline enables cross‑category comparisons, high‑precision tracking of long‑term temporal shifts, and spatial mapping of public opinion and policy outcomes, and can be extended to new platforms, languages, and social categories via both point‑and‑click and programmatic interfaces.

By Babak Hemmatian, Sarah Hadjarab, Jessica Chen, Benedek Kurdi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

arXiv:2606. 19625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B.

By Glenn Matlin, Chandreyi Chakraborty, Saehee Eom, Mika Okamoto, Rayan Castilla, Louis Jaburi, Alvin Deng, Taywon Min, Lucia Quirke, Stella Biderman, Mark Riedl
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Science Utopia? Closed-Loop LLM Simulation of Academic Research Ecosystems

The paper introduces SciUtopia, a closed‑loop large‑language‑model simulation framework that models the evolving academic research ecosystem, including research direction, collaboration, publication, peer review, funding, and researcher attrition. Running 61 simulation worlds, the system simulates over 40,000 researchers and 1.2 million LLM‑generated peer reviews, revealing that rejection‑driven resubmission increases reviewer burden, cautious exploration balances citation impact with career success, and resource inequality can arise without early‑funding advantage.

By Yiqiao Jin, Yiyang Wang, Lucheng Fu, Bing He, Siheng Xiong, Yijia Xiao, B. Aditya Prakash, Josiah Hester, Srijan Kumar, James Evans, Jindong Wang