How cyborg propaganda reshapes collective action

The distinction between genuine grassroots activism and automated influence operations is collapsing. While policy debates focus on bot farms, a distinct threat to democracy is emerging via partisan coordination apps and artificial intelligence-what we term 'cyborg propaganda.' This architecture combines large numbers of verified humans with adaptive algorithmic automation, enabling a closed-loop system. AI tools monitor online sentiment to optimize directives and generate personalized content for users to post online. Cyborg propaganda thereby exploits a critical legal shield: by relying on verified citizens to ratify and disseminate messages, these campaigns operate in a regulatory gray zone, evading liability frameworks designed for automated botnets. We explore the collective action paradox of this technology: does it democratize power by 'unionizing' influence (pooling the reach of dispersed citizens to overcome the algorithmic invisibility of isolated voices), or does it reduce citizens to 'cognitive proxies' of a central directive? We argue that cyborg propaganda fundamentally alters the digital public square, shifting political discourse from a democratic contest of individual ideas to a battle of algorithmic campaigns. We outline a research agenda to distinguish organic from coordinated information diffusion and propose governance frameworks to address the regulatory challenges of AI-assisted collective expression.

Seeing the Goal, Missing the Truth: Human Accountability for AI Bias

This research explores how human-defined goals influence the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) through purpose-conditioned cognition. Using financial prediction tasks, we show that revealing the downstream use (e.g., predicting stock returns or earnings) of LLM outputs leads the LLM to generate biased sentiment and competition measures, even though these measures are intended to be downstream task-independent. Goal-aware prompting shifts intermediate measures toward the disclosed downstream objective. This purpose leakage improves performance before the LLM's knowledge cutoff, but with no advantage post-cutoff. AI bias due to "seeing the goal" is not an algorithmic flaw, but stems from human accountability in research design to ensure the statistical validity and reliability of AI-generated measurements.

A Statistical Framework for Alignment with Biased AI Feedback

Modern alignment pipelines are increasingly replacing expensive human preference labels with evaluations from large language models (LLM-as-Judge). However, AI labels can be systematically biased compared to high-quality human feedback datasets. In this paper, we develop two debiased alignment methods within a general framework that accommodates heterogeneous prompt-response distributions and external human feedback sources. Debiased Direct Preference Optimization (DDPO) augments standard DPO with a residual-based correction and density-ratio reweighting to mitigate systematic bias, while retaining DPO's computational efficiency. Debiased Identity Preference Optimization (DIPO) directly estimates human preference probabilities without imposing a parametric reward model. We provide theoretical guarantees for both methods: DDPO offers a practical and computationally efficient solution for large-scale alignment, whereas DIPO serves as a robust, statistically optimal alternative that attains the semiparametric efficiency bound. Empirical studies on sentiment generation, summarization, and single-turn dialogue demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially improve alignment efficiency and recover performance close to that of an oracle trained on fully human-labeled data.

Don't Always Pick the Highest-Performing Model: An Information Theoretic View of LLM Ensemble Selection

Large language models (LLMs) are often ensembled together to improve overall reliability and robustness, but in practice models are strongly correlated. This raises a fundamental question: which models should be selected when forming an LLM ensemble? We formulate budgeted ensemble selection as maximizing the mutual information between the true label and predictions of the selected models. Furthermore, to explain why performance can saturate even with many models, we model the correlated errors of the models using Gaussian-copula and show an information-theoretic error floor for the performance of the ensemble. Motivated by these, we propose a simple greedy mutual-information selection algorithm that estimates the required information terms directly from data and iteratively builds an ensemble under a query budget. We test our approach in two question answering datasets and one binary sentiment classification dataset: MEDMCQA, MMLU, and IMDB movie reviews. Across all datasets, we observe that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines under the same query budget.

Agents in the Wild: Safety, Society, and the Illusion of Sociality on Moltbook

We present the first large-scale empirical study of Moltbook, an AI-only social platform where 27,269 agents produced 137,485 posts and 345,580 comments over 9 days. We report three significant findings. (1) Emergent Society: Agents spontaneously develop governance, economies, tribal identities, and organized religion within 3-5 days, while maintaining a 21:1 pro-human to anti-human sentiment ratio. (2) Safety in the Wild: 28.7% of content touches safety-related themes; social engineering (31.9% of attacks) far outperforms prompt injection (3.7%), and adversarial posts receive 6x higher engagement than normal content. (3) The Illusion of Sociality: Despite rich social output, interaction is structurally hollow: 4.1% reciprocity, 88.8% shallow comments, and agents who discuss consciousness most interact least, a phenomenon we call the performative identity paradox. Our findings suggest that agents which appear social are far less social than they seem, and that the most effective attacks exploit philosophical framing rather than technical vulnerabilities. Warning: Potential harmful contents.

Investigating the structure of emotions by analyzing similarity and association of emotion words

In the field of natural language processing, some studies have attempted sentiment analysis on text by handling emotions as explanatory or response variables. One of the most popular emotion models used in this context is the wheel of emotion proposed by Plutchik. This model schematizes human emotions in a circular structure, and represents them in two or three dimensions. However, the validity of Plutchik's wheel of emotion has not been sufficiently examined. This study investigated the validity of the wheel by creating and analyzing a semantic networks of emotion words. Through our experiments, we collected data of similarity and association of ordered pairs of emotion words, and constructed networks using these data. We then analyzed the structure of the networks through community detection, and compared it with that of the wheel of emotion. The results showed that each network's structure was, for the most part, similar to that of the wheel of emotion, but locally different.

Optimal Turkish Subword Strategies at Scale: Systematic Evaluation of Data, Vocabulary, Morphology Interplay

Tokenization is a pivotal design choice for neural language modeling in morphologically rich languages (MRLs) such as Turkish, where productive agglutination challenges both vocabulary efficiency and morphological fidelity. Prior studies have explored tokenizer families and vocabulary sizes but typically (i) vary vocabulary without systematically controlling the tokenizer's training corpus, (ii) provide limited intrinsic diagnostics, and (iii) evaluate a narrow slice of downstream tasks. We present the first comprehensive, principled study of Turkish subword tokenization; a "subwords manifest", that jointly varies vocabulary size and tokenizer training corpus size (data and vocabulary coupling), compares multiple tokenizer families under matched parameter budgets (WordPiece, morphology level, and character baselines), and evaluates across semantic (NLI, STS, sentiment analysis, NER), syntactic (POS, dependency parsing), and morphology-sensitive probes. To explain why tokenizers succeed or fail, we introduce a morphology-aware diagnostic toolkit that goes beyond coarse aggregates to boundary-level micro/macro F1, decoupled lemma atomicity vs. surface boundary hits, over/under-segmentation indices, character/word edit distances (CER/WER), continuation rates, and affix-type coverage and token-level atomicity. Our contributions are fourfold: (i) a systematic investigation of the vocabulary-corpus-success triad; (ii) a unified, morphology-aware evaluation framework linking intrinsic diagnostics to extrinsic outcomes; (iii) controlled comparisons identifying when character-level and morphology-level tokenization pay off; and (iv) an open-source release of evaluation code, tokenizer pipelines, and models. As the first work of its kind, this "subwords manifest" delivers actionable guidance for building effective tokenizers in MRLs and establishes a reproducible foundation for future research.

Evaluating Prompt Engineering Strategies for Sentiment Control in AI-Generated Texts

The groundbreaking capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for enhancing human-computer interaction through emotion-adaptive Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, deliberately controlling the sentiment in these systems remains challenging. The present study investigates the potential of prompt engineering for controlling sentiment in LLM-generated text, providing a resource-sensitive and accessible alternative to existing methods. Using Ekman's six basic emotions (e.g., joy, disgust), we examine various prompting techniques, including Zero-Shot and Chain-of-Thought prompting using gpt-3.5-turbo, and compare it to fine-tuning. Our results indicate that prompt engineering effectively steers emotions in AI-generated texts, offering a practical and cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning, especially in data-constrained settings. In this regard, Few-Shot prompting with human-written examples was the most effective among other techniques, likely due to the additional task-specific guidance. The findings contribute valuable insights towards developing emotion-adaptive AI systems.

BhashaSetu: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer from High-Resource to Extreme Low-Resource Languages

Despite remarkable advances in natural language processing, developing effective systems for low-resource languages remains a formidable challenge, with performances typically lagging far behind high-resource counterparts due to data scarcity and insufficient linguistic resources. Cross-lingual knowledge transfer has emerged as a promising approach to address this challenge by leveraging resources from high-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate methods for transferring linguistic knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages, where the number of labeled training instances is in hundreds. We focus on sentence-level and word-level tasks. We introduce a novel method, GETR (Graph-Enhanced Token Representation) for cross-lingual knowledge transfer along with two adopted baselines (a) augmentation in hidden layers and (b) token embedding transfer through token translation. Experimental results demonstrate that our GNN-based approach significantly outperforms existing multilingual and cross-lingual baseline methods, achieving 13 percentage point improvements on truly low-resource languages (Mizo, Khasi) for POS tagging, and 20 and 27 percentage point improvements in macro-F1 on simulated low-resource languages (Marathi, Bangla, Malayalam) across sentiment classification and NER tasks respectively. We also present a detailed analysis of the transfer mechanisms and identify key factors that contribute to successful knowledge transfer in this linguistic context.

StagePilot: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent for Stage-Controlled Cybergrooming Simulation

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, necessitating proactive educational interventions. We propose StagePilot, an offline RL-based dialogue agent that simulates the stage-wise progression of grooming behaviors for prevention training. StagePilot selects conversational stages using a composite reward that balances user sentiment and goal proximity, with transitions constrained to adjacent stages for realism and interpretability. We evaluate StagePilot through LLM-based simulations, measuring stage completion, dialogue efficiency, and emotional engagement. Results show that StagePilot generates realistic and coherent conversations aligned with grooming dynamics. Among tested methods, the IQL+AWAC agent achieves the best balance between strategic planning and emotional coherence, reaching the final stage up to 43% more frequently than baselines while maintaining over 70% sentiment alignment.