This is the web version of the June 2025 edition of the Center for an Informed Public‘s News & Insights newsletter that was originally sent out on June 18, 2025.
Thanks to your support, the CIP’s vital research and mission continue
Amid a volatile period of significant uncertainty, Center for an Informed Public faculty director Emma Spiro underscores an important point in a blog post: “We’re not going anywhere. The CIP’s vital research studying false and misleading information and our mission to support a more informed public continues.”
- 06.16.2025 | Read Emma Spiro’s CIP blog post.
- 05.28.2025 | Spiro in a Science Advances editorial: “Misinformation research continues to be urgent science”
- 05.27.2025 | In a KUOW Public Radio interview, CIP co-founder Kate Starbird discusses the impacts of federal research grant cuts.
Make an online donation to support the Center for an Informed Public’s general operations.
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CIP awards 2025 Innovation Fund grants to 3 projects
The projects will study politicization and polarization in entertainment media; social inclusion prompts for belief disengagement; and AI and online safety.
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Nguyễn honored for mentorship efforts in CIP community
Information School doctoral candidate Sarah Nguyễn was recently awarded the Robert Mason CIP Excellence in Mentorship Award.
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CIP Community Fellowship application deadline nears
Are you passionate about the CIP’s work, research and mission? Applications to be part of the 2025–26 CIP Community Fellowship program cohort are due on June 30.
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Watch CIP experts discuss impacts of AI on classroom teaching and learning
In April, the CIP co-sponsored Preparing Citizens for an AI Powered World, part of an ongoing series of educational webinars with the UW Alumni Association’s UW Impact. The webinar featured CIP co-founder Jevin West, an Information School professor and associate dean of research; CIP faculty member Katy Pearce, a Department of Communication associate professor; and Information School PhD student Shahan Ali Memon discussing a variety of issues related to AI, teaching and learning. Watch the webinar.
- Pearce has been interviewed recently by The New York Times, KUOW Public Radio and CNET for her insights regarding AI and its impacts on classroom teaching and learning..
- During the webinar, Memon spoke about work he and West contributed to the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) AI Advisory Group and recommendations included in OSPI’s Human Centered Guidance for K-12 Schools.
- Earlier this year, West and CIP faculty member Carl Bergstrom introduced Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?, a free online course with 18 lessons to better understand the risks and rewards of generative AI.
Escape rooms offer an immersive approach to misinformation
In American Libraries, CIP co-founder Chris Coward and faculty member Jin Ha Lee share lessons from educational gaming development at the CIP and iSchool.
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Seattle Times publishes CIP community fellow’s op/ed on AI
“Congress should not silence the states. We need every tool available to protect ourselves as AI gets more powerful,” Danica Noble writes in The Seattle Times.
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With AI, instead of super intelligence, we’ve created super communicators
Systems using artificial intelligence, including conversational chatbots, have become more human-like than had ever been imagined where their communication skills are now better than most people. In “The benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents,” recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia and CIP co-founder Jevin West show how these systems become irresistible, letting users forget that they’re interacting with machines that do not possess genuine humanness.
- Read more about research on AI and anthropomorphic seduction.
- Jevin West and co-authors adapted the PNAS article for “Evidence shows AI systems are already too much like humans. Will that be a problem?,“ distributed via The Conversation.
More CIP Research: Check out a listing of articles and other peer-reviewed contributions from CIP-affiliated researchers published thus far in 2025, including work in Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Social Networks and the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.
