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Estimating exposure to information on a social network is a problem with important consequences for our society. The exposure estimation problem involves finding the fraction of people on the network who have been exposed to a piece of information (e.g., a URL of a news article on Facebook, a hashtag on Twitter). The exact value of exposure to a piece of information is determined by two features: the structure of the underlying social network and the set of people who shared the piece of information. Often, both features are not publicly available (i.e., access to the two features is limited only to the internal administrators of the platform) and are difficult to estimate from data. As a solution, we propose two methods to estimate the exposure to a piece of information in an unbiased manner: a vanilla method that is based on sampling the network uniformly and a method that non-uniformly samples the network motivated by the Friendship Paradox. We provide theoretical results that characterize the conditions (in terms of properties of the network and the piece of information) under which one method outperforms the other. Further, we outline extensions of the proposed methods to dynamic information cascades (where the exposure needs to be tracked in real time). We demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed methods via experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets. 

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into a variety of writing tasks. While these tools can help people by generating ideas or producing higher quality work, like many other AI tools they may risk causing a variety of harms, disproportionately burdening historically marginalized groups. In this work, we introduce and evaluate perceptual harm, a term for the harm caused to users when others perceive or suspect them of using AI. We examined perceptual harms in three online experiments, each of which entailed human participants evaluating the profiles for fictional freelance writers. We asked participants whether they suspected the freelancers of using AI, the quality of their writing, and whether they should be hired. We found some support for perceptual harms against for certain demographic groups, but that perceptions of AI use negatively impacted writing evaluations and hiring outcomes across the board. 

Given large language models’ (LLMs) increasing integration into workplace software, it is important to examine how biases in the models may impact workers. For example, stylistic biases in the language suggested by LLMs may cause feelings of alienation and result in increased labor for individuals or groups whose style does not match. We examine how such writer-style bias impacts inclusion, control, and ownership over the work when co-writing with LLMs. In an online experiment, participants wrote hypothetical job promotion requests using either hesitant or self-assured auto-complete suggestions from an LLM and reported their subsequent perceptions. We found that the style of the AI model did not impact perceived inclusion. However, individuals with higher perceived inclusion did perceive greater agency and ownership, an effect more strongly impacting participants of minoritized genders. Feelings of inclusion mitigated a loss of control and agency when accepting more AI suggestions. 

AI technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make suggestions to autocomplete text as people write. Can these suggestions impact people’s writing and attitudes? In two large-scale preregistered experiments (N=2,582), we expose participants who are writing about important societal issues to biased AI-generated suggestions. The attitudes participants expressed in their writing and in a post-task survey converged towards the AI’s position. Yet, a majority of participants were unaware of the AI suggestions’ bias and their influence. Further, awareness of the task or of the AI’s bias, e.g. warning participants about potential bias before or after exposure to the treatment, did not mitigate the influence effect. Moreover, the AI’s influence is not fully explained by the additional information provided by the suggestions.