Points
A home for ideas and reflections at the intersection of technology and society, our blog publishes pieces that consider timely issues and essential questions related to our work and the field.
Reframing Our Relationship to Technology
Building Civic Strength for an AI Era
Our new AI Civics initiative treats AI not as a tool to be mastered, but as a domain of civic life where people have rights, responsibilities, and avenues for collective action.
Policy and Accountability
Protecting the Public from Chatbot Harms: Aligning State Policy with Research
Policy Manager Serena Oduro outlines a set of recommendations aimed at the gap between current legislation and the reality of how people engage with chatbots.
Policy and Accountability
When AI-Altered Media Becomes a Due Process Crisis
As official government accounts release manipulated photos or videos depicting arrests and the use of force, this media begins to influence public understanding — before courts, lawyers, or juries ever evaluate the evidence, writes Nicholas E. Stewart, executive director of the Justice Education Project.
Series
AI in Science
In this series, AI on the Ground Program Director Ranjit Singh explores how AI systems are being taken up in scientific practice.
Policy and Accountability
December 3, 2025
Situating Virginia's Data Center Alley in a New Era of Tech Power
Hannah Lipstein and Tamara Kneese examine Virginia’s Data Center Alley, and explain why their research looks at not only individual sites but “how the politics, economics, and cultural factors of a place" inform effective organizing strategies.
October 29, 2025
The Uses and Limits of Algorithmic Impact Assessments
Meg Young and Tamara Kneese outline lessons learned about how algorithmic impact assessments can be more effective in catalyzing change.
September 9, 2025
Fashion’s Data Doubles
In their research on how AI is reshaping modeling work, Alexandra Mateescu, Zoë West, and Sanjay Pinto find a situation ripe for labor exploitation.
Participation and Trust
January 14, 2026
Data as Destiny in the Steel City
Telling Pittsburgh’s story as one of seamless progress flattens the lived realities that have accompanied its industrial transformations, Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes and Cella Sum write.
August 20, 2025
In Pennsylvania, a Nuclear Revival for an Uncertain AI Future
Three Mile Island, site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history, is coming back online to power the AI boom. Livia Garofalo, Joan Mukogosi, and Maia Woluchem explore what this means for the surrounding community.
February 5, 2025
Digital Infrastructures, Material Consequences
Members of the Trustworthy Infrastructures team write about their research road trip through Pennsylvania, where they traced the connection from the industrial past to our tech-dominated present.
Reframing Our Relationship to Technology
December 9, 2025
Rethinking AI Sovereignty in and from the Majority World
Ranjit Singh considers the stakes of AI sovereignty, the tension between default settings and local autonomy, and who gets to decide what happens inside the systems that people come to depend on.
December 1, 2025
All the Lonely People
When researchers Ranjit Singh, Livia Garofalo, Briana Vecchione, and Emnet Tafesse set out to interview people about their use of mental health chatbots, they encountered a particular kind of AI-enabled deception.
August 6, 2025
What Happens When People Turn to Chatbots for Therapy?
Chatbots are reshaping not only how people seek help, but how they define it, researcher Briana Vecchione writes.