Owen Leonard
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owenleonard.bsky.social
Owen Leonard
@owenleonard.bsky.social
59 followers 63 following 51 posts
PhD student in English at UC Santa Barbara, working on critical AI/ML.

See my work at owenleonard.dev and check out the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning at huml.ucsb.edu.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Owen Leonard
teddyroland.bsky.social
New article in AI & Society with @richardjeanso.bsky.social and @hoytlong.bsky.social 🎉

We wanted to know how AI might affect cultural fields like literary publishing. But cultural production is complex! So we piloted a new method we call “social simulation.”

rdcu.be/eTkMy
The social AI author: modeling creativity and distinction in simulated cultural fields
rdcu.be
December 15, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Owen Leonard
inqualia.bsky.social
2 weeks left on this (no idea why I put the deadline on a weekend)
inqualia.bsky.social Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 10
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
globalmediations.mit.edu
August 30, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Reposted by Owen Leonard
peligrietzer.bsky.social
Total Theory of Vibe cultural victory alignment.anthropic.com/2025/sublimi...
Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data
alignment.anthropic.com
July 22, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Reposted by Owen Leonard
inqualia.bsky.social
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
globalmediations.mit.edu
July 10, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Reposted by Owen Leonard
alanyliu.bsky.social
My personal 5-min. video: vimeo.com/84252711 on why humanities matter. I can’t improve on the message. But my passion now is the Center for Humanities Communication, which I cofounded to assist the humanities in methods, resources, tools for telling its _why_, center-humanities-communication.org
Why the Humanities Matter -- A Story About Borders
A story and statement about the importance of the humanities in today's world by Alan Liu, an English professor who started out a chemistry major. Video created…
vimeo.com
June 28, 2025 at 8:06 AM
Reposted by Owen Leonard
alanyliu.bsky.social
Happy to to announce that @mellonfoundation has awarded our Center for Humanities Communication (CHC) a $150,000 grant (via @aacu.org, which supports CHC in the role of our fiscal sponsor). Our news release: center-humanities-communication.org/chc-blog/new...
ALT-TEXT: Screenshot of top of Center for Humanities Communications’ news release on its new Mellon Foundation grant. Shown is text that reads: <screenshot> Center for Humanities Communication Receives $150,000 Mellon Foundation Grant to Start Work Feb. 2, 2025 — How can scholars, creatives, and others working in the humanities better communicate their work to the public? How can humanities communicators–like their science communicator colleagues–benefit from professional training for needed roles in education, the media, cultural and entertainment industries, non-profits, and elsewhere? And what new materials and tools can they invent for telling the humanities’ story across platforms? To jump start the Center for Humanities Communication (CHC) in creating training and resources to address such questions, the Mellon Foundation has awarded the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) a grant of $150,000 to help launch the recently formed CHC. (The AAC&U supports the CHC as it establishes itself by acting as its fiscal sponsor.) (Read more .) </screenshot> (The full news release is at: https://center-humanities-communication.org/chc-blog/news-release-center-for-humanities-communication-receives-150000-mellon-foundation-grant-to-start-work/)
February 3, 2025 at 8:05 PM
owenleonard.bsky.social
Just published Ground to Cloud, a wide-ranging web gallery of planetary AI infrastructure:

g2c.owenleonard.dev
Ground to Cloud | Artificial Intelligence Infratructure
Ground to Cloud (G2C) brings together scholarly research and investigative journalism on the vast array of infrastructure that supports contemporary artificial intelligence and machine learning, with ...
g2c.owenleonard.dev
February 3, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Owen Leonard
alanyliu.bsky.social
Brilliant talk today by Hannes Bajohr (@hannesbajohr.de) on “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text & its Styles” at launch of UCSB Center for the Humanities & Machine Learning (huml.ucsb.edu/events). Bajohr is 2nd from left with (L to R) ‪@zentralwerkstatt.org, Rita Raley, & @owenleonard.bsky.social.
Fabian Offert, Hannes Bajohr, Rita Raley, & Owen Leonard (seated in photo left to right) at a table under a screen showing the title slide of Bajohr’s talk on “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles.” (Slide consists of white san-serif text against a dark background without images.)
January 25, 2025 at 2:17 AM
owenleonard.bsky.social
"The semantic bleaching of 'AI' as valuations climb threatens to confine Critical AI scholarship to the very cultural moment it seeks to criticize."

Check out the conclusions from my survey of humanities-inflected AI critique in the U.S.:

huml.ucsb.edu/report
Report | Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning
huml.ucsb.edu
January 15, 2025 at 5:02 PM