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Join us for a bonus episode of the online seminar series event hosted by MIT Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program! This event features Media Lab alum Ziv Epstein, now a SERC Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Talks are all recorded and made available afterwards on YouTube, linked on each event webpage.
This session is hosted in person and online.
Algorithmic amplifiers like social media and AI chatbots play an increasingly important role in how our society operates. But despite being built with noble intentions, these algorithmic systems have demonstrated a fundamental misalignment with their users’ values: resulting in the amplification of low-quality information designed to reward hack and sensationalize. In this talk, I discuss new ways to measure and steer algorithmic systems to align them with users’ values. In a first series of lab and field experiments in the context of sharing misinformation on social media, I show that this can be mitigated by steering behavior via reminding people of their own values. In a second project, I introduce a novel personalization architecture for measuring the expression of basic human values. I will then apply it to a large-scale audit of X's ranking algorithm to reveal how subtle value tensions in users' engagement behavior produces a fundamental misalignment between algorithmic amplification and user's self-stated values. To close, I will discuss ongoing work on aligning AI systems for collective goals of diversity and autotelicty, focusing on the domain of human creativity and creative production.
Dr. Ziv Epstein is a computational social scientist sitting between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and History Theory & Criticism in the School of Architecture. His current research explores how to audit the values amplified by social media ranking algorithms, and how to steer these algorithms to align with human values. Beyond social media, he is also interested in the impacts of AI on creative production in settings such as visual media and interpretative labor (e.g. divination). He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University (2023-2025), and received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab (2023) where his dissertation focused on new ways to operationalize and measure attention on social media and implications for fighting misinformation online. He is also a practicing multimedia artist whose work has been featured in Ars Electronica, MIT Museum, and Burning Man.