Vibing the Political

03/06/2026

Thank you to my friends at Spectrum News for the chance to talk about the Texas primaries.

12/24/2025

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-scientists-ai-tools-publishing-papers.html

Science is entering a massive publishing boom, in large part due to artificial intelligence. New research published in the journal Science has revealed that scientists who use large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are producing significantly more papers across many fields. The technology is also...

10/30/2025

Democracy Needs Its Own Language Model

America’s democratic institutions are exhausted. They still function, but they no longer form citizens or inspire shared purpose. The arrival of artificial intelligence forces a question we’ve avoided too long: How do we rebuild the civic foundations that hold democracy together?

At Huston-Tillotson University’s James L. Farmer House Politics Lab, we’re beginning that work through the Civic LLM, a public experiment in democratic design. Instead of treating AI as a market product, we’re testing whether it can serve as civic infrastructure: a tool that helps people see how power moves, how institutions work, and how collective decisions are made.

This essay outlines the vision and the first steps of that work. It’s about reclaiming design as a democratic act, the belief that institutions, like technologies, can be built for freedom.

We'd be grateful if you gave it a read and shared your thoughts.

https://medium.com//democracy-needs-its-own-language-model-e87521f8e947

Democracy Needs Its Own Language Model

10/21/2025

Open Call: Civic AI Lab Working Group

The James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University invites scholars, technologists, and civic leaders to join the Civic AI Lab Working Group, an open research collaboration exploring how artificial intelligence can strengthen democracy through design.

We are building the first civic-design AI initiative at an HBCU. The working group develops the concept of the Civic LLM, a large language model fine-tuned on a civic ontology that names the roles, institutions, practices, and values sustaining democratic life.

Read the full Open Call: Civic AI Lab Working Group https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ULYCmIeql4UjdV7cSGhKjTfMoaBTnDr3/view?usp=sharing

Learn more about the theoretical foundation in the Civic LLM Working Paper (OSF 2025):
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xuk2g_v1

10/16/2025

Democracy doesn’t die, it decays.
Not from apathy, but from bad design.

My new paper, Civic Architecture, argues that if we want a democracy that lasts, we have to rebuild the institutions that hold it up.

🔗 https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/g4mtb_v1

09/18/2025

Incredible accomplishment for my University! So proud!

/PRNewswire/ -- Today Huston-Tillotson University (HT) announced it has received a transformative $150 million donation from the Moody Foundation. This is the...

09/15/2025

I’m excited to share my new op-ed published in The Hechinger Report:

“The push to expand school choice is reshaping the landscape of American education — but leaving behind fundamental democratic values.”

The piece argues that school choice is not just about education policy but about the civic foundations of our democracy.

Read the full op-ed here:

The push to expand school choice is reorganizing the very purpose of schooling. And in that shift, something essential is being lost — civic education.

08/23/2025

A conversation on the democratic future AI

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xuk2g_v1 CB

Large language models are trained to model statistical regularities in web scale corpora. They tend to reproduce the categories most prevalent in those data, including reductive framings of public life that equate democracy with choice and procedure rather than shared authorship. Alignment methods s...

08/21/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/europe/ukraine-ceasefire-peace-deal-difference-analysis-latam-intl

The first might be the only way out of the current violence. The second would be against international law.

06/11/2025

06/10/2025

06/08/2025

https://x.com/smalls2672/status/1931097743952650428?s=46