Alex Leitch

Celia Chen, Alex Leitch, Scotty Beland et al.

Incels are an online community of men who share a belief in extreme misogyny, the glorification of violence, and biological essentialism. They refer to their core ideology as "The Blackpill", a belief that physical attraction is the only path to romantic success and that women are only attracted to one very specific, hypermasculine archetype. This is not only a belief system; incels believe their ideology grounded in hard science. The research that incels use as evidence of their belief system is collected in an extensive online document, the Scientific Blackpill wiki page. In this research, we analyze the claims made on the wiki against the research cited to assess how the wiki authors are using or misusing science in support of their ideology. We find that the page largely cites legitimate science and describes it partly or mostly accurately. However, in discussing it, the results are often overgeneralized, stripped of context, or otherwise distorted to support the preexisting incel viewpoint. This echoes previous findings about motivated reasoning and borrowing scientific legitimacy in other misinformation and conspiracy-minded ideologies. We discuss the implications this has for understanding online radicalization and information quality.

Alex Leitch, Celia Chen

As AI art generation becomes increasingly sophisticated, HCI research has focused primarily on questions of detection, authenticity, and automation. This paper argues that such approaches fundamentally misunderstand how artistic value emerges from the concerns that drive human image production. Through examination of historical precedents, we demonstrate that artistic style is not only visual appearance but the resolution of creative struggle, as artists wrestle with influence and technical constraints to develop unique ways of seeing. Current AI systems flatten these human choices into reproducible patterns without preserving their provenance. We propose that HCI's role lies not only in perfecting visual output, but in developing means to document the origins and evolution of artistic style as it appears within generated visual traces. This reframing suggests new technical directions for HCI research in generative AI, focused on automatic documentation of stylistic lineage and creative choice rather than simple reproduction of aesthetic effects.

Celia Chen, Scotty Beland, Ingo Burghardt et al.

Violent threats remain a significant problem across social media platforms. Useful, high-quality data facilitates research into the understanding and detection of malicious content, including violence. In this paper, we introduce a cross-platform dataset of 30,000 posts hand-coded for violent threats and sub-types of violence, including political and sexual violence. To evaluate the signal present in this dataset, we perform a machine learning analysis with an existing dataset of violent comments from YouTube. We find that, despite originating from different platforms and using different coding criteria, we achieve high classification accuracy both by training on one dataset and testing on the other, and in a merged dataset condition. These results have implications for content-classification strategies and for understanding violent content across social media.

Celia Chen, Alex Leitch

This paper examines how graduate students develop frameworks for evaluating machine-generated expertise in web-based interactions with large language models (LLMs). Through a qualitative study combining surveys, LLM interaction transcripts, and in-depth interviews with 14 graduate students, we identify patterns in how these emerging professionals assess and engage with AI-generated content. Our findings reveal that students construct evaluation frameworks shaped by three main factors: professional identity, verification capabilities, and system navigation experience. Rather than uniformly accepting or rejecting LLM outputs, students protect domains central to their professional identities while delegating others--with managers preserving conceptual work, designers safeguarding creative processes, and programmers maintaining control over core technical expertise. These evaluation frameworks are further influenced by students' ability to verify different types of content and their experience navigating complex systems. This research contributes to web science by highlighting emerging human-genAI interaction patterns and suggesting how platforms might better support users in developing effective frameworks for evaluating machine-generated expertise signals in AI-mediated web environments.