Levin Brinkmann

@LevinBrinkmann

Research Scientist at the Center for Humans and Machines (MPI) - How does AI impact human cultural evolution? levinbrinkmann.com

Joined November 2020

213 Following 255 Followers 101 Posts

Latest posts 5

Levin Brinkmann @LevinBrinkmann Oct 22

LLMs learned science from our papers. Reproducing our blind spots.

We will show at NeurIPS 2026 how to alien inspirations can push AI to discover beyond human cultural constraints.

Alejandro H. Artiles Verified account @aleHArtiles Oct 22

SCIENCE HAS BLIND SPOTS.
We built AI to explore them 👽

The Alien Space of Science, my internship project at @tiptreesystems, has been accepted to the #NeurIPS2026 Main Track!

We sample ideas that make scientific sense, but that no existing community is positioned to propose.
🧵👇

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Levin Brinkmann @LevinBrinkmann Aug 19

How do social incentives and structures shape AI behavior? How do machines co-evolve with us?

Come to figure it out and explore similar questions not yet asked. CogSci, Econ, Physics, CS, Psyc. Everyone here comes from somewhere different, and everyone is kind about it.

Iyad Rahwan | إياد رهوان Verified account @iyadrahwan Aug 4

📣 Job alert

I am hiring a 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗙𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻-𝗔𝗜 𝗛𝘆𝗯𝗿𝗶𝗱 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀

📍 Berlin, Germany
📅 3-year position
💡 Ideal for researchers with a PhD in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or related fields and a strong background in AI, reinforcement learning, and computational social science.

Focus may include the following areas:

✅ Fine-tuning of large language models on rewards derived from social interactions or collective outcomes
✅ Evolutionary adaptations of AI agents in social simulations
✅ Behavioral experiments with human-AI hybrid groups
✅ Advancing the theoretical understanding of human-AI co-evolution

👉 Deadline: August 27, 2026
👉 Apply now: careers.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/jobs/8112072-p…
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Levin Brinkmann @LevinBrinkmann Aug 18

We worry about homogenisation, but can AI also expand human culture? In a multi-generational experiment we demonstrate AI-induced cultural shifts. Machines lastingly shift human behavior, beyond their presence, just as AlphaGo did to Go.
nature.com/articles/s4146…

www.nature.com Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture Nature Communications - AI can uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Here, the authors show that AI-discovered strategies propagate and persist in human populations, producing...

Levin Brinkmann @LevinBrinkmann May 25

Does generative AI flatten artistic skills? We compared laypeople, artists, and AI agents using generative AI.
Artists outcompete laypeople. AI agents outcompete both. But the best individuals are still artists.
Read more in our IJHCI paper: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

www.tandfonline.com Expertise Elevates AI Usage: Experimental Evidence Comparing Laypeople and Professional Artists Generative AI’s novel capacities raise questions about the future role of human expertise: does it level the playing field between professional artists and laypeople, or does expertise enhance AI u...

Levin Brinkmann @LevinBrinkmann May 23

Agents exploring beyond the training data often collapse into highly correlated ideas.
A small GPT-2 sized "Alien" inspiration module, designed specifically to avoid this traps, can broading scientific exploration without sacrificing coherence. arxiv.org/abs/2603.01092

arxiv.org The Alien Space of Science: Sampling Coherent but Cognitively... Scientific discovery is constrained not only by what is true, but by what is cognitively available to researchers. Many directions are coherent in light of the literature yet unlikely to be...