Jonathan Stray

Hello, every day I am working on making sure AI doesn't escalate human conflict.

- AI-powered social media can reduce polarization rankingchallenge.substack.com/p/its-possible…
- This is now a product you can use mysky.social
- We showed that a rigorous definition of "political neutrality" is possible and increases trust x.com/jonathanstray/…
- We've got a proof-of-concept superhuman conflict resolution bot working in the lab
- Next is human validation tests, then multi-turn model evals.

AI-induced conflict is a catastrophic risk. Here's the broader research agenda: betterconflictbulletin.org/p/conflict-sup…

Will AI finally enable effective central planning? This is a rehash of the old "socialist calculation debate."
My take is: while the actual "calculations" are now tractable, markets produce essential information that seems hard to get otherwise.

In particular, it seems impossible to get accurate demand signals without actually having people trade for what they want. Otherwise, people have an incentive to exaggerate and say that their needs are very, very important.
hetwebsite.net/het/essays/par…

I want to prevent AI from starting wars. Wars between people. It has to understand human conflict, but I'm not building a mediator. The biggest risk is what AI says to individual people in conflict, because that's the most common case by orders of magnitude. I think better is possible. Here's what I know so far.
docs.google.com/presentation/d…

Journalists' approach to correcting misinfo has mostly failed, because those who are most likely to believe false rumors are also the least likely to trust media. There is another option: make the strongest case for both sides and let the evidence speak for itself. instagram.com/p/DfC2OLYT2Ls/

"The scandal is in the selectivity."

In an era of abundant fact checks, this is the most common claim of media bias. Not "you are lying" but "why did you cover this instead of that?"

Here, the complaint is coming from the left. But I do have some sympathy for what Weiss is trying to do at CBS, because "why did you cover this instead of that?" has been a complaint from the right for a long time -- consider, for example, coverage of social justice issues vs. coverage of unauthorized immigration. Selective coverage is one reason why mainstream outlets have been bleeding out their conservative audiences for decades.

I'm not saying I approve of how Weiss is handling this. Swinging from one pole to the other is not really a solution, and I've written elsewhere on what journalism that could be trusted by both sides would like like. But I do think the problem she sees is real.

salon.com/2026/10/20/bar…