Zoë Hitzig

I wrote an essay about the recent embrace of location-sharing apps + why it should really, like, really, freak you out—new in @thedrift_mag thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/

Join us for the launch of @trevorpaglen’s book: How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI 📅 Saturday May 23rd, 7pm 📍EARTH, 49 Orchard st, NY with special guests @zhitzig and Josh Kline. Paglen’s new book asks what images become when they no longer simply represent the world, but actively watch, classify, predict, and shape it. Published by @VersoBooks

New work with @AlecRad and @DavidDuvenaud: Have you ever dreamed of talking to someone from the past? Introducing talkie, a 13B model trained only on pre-1931 text. Vintage models should help us to understand how LMs generalize (e.g., can we teach talkie to code?). Thread:

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Forthcoming in the AER: "Contextually Private Mechanisms" by Andreas Haupt and Zoë Hitzig. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

In the making for four years with the insightful @zhitzig ! The idea of limiting disclosure to what is necessary is becoming more important than ever with models capable of drawing powerful inferences!

Extremely important work:

The @nytimes piece today by @ByrneEdsal13590 highlights a concern I share: “If we stay on the current path, the risk of extreme concentration — both economic and political — is very real.” In work with @zhitzig, we ask why AI may shift the balance between dispersed knowledge and centralized control.

I used to lead the Geopolitics Team at OpenAI. Today I published a few observations on frontier AI companies and their military usage policies from my perspective as a former employee and researcher active in the int’l security space. (Link below.)

@alexolegimas This paper matches demographic data to real-world usage from chatgpt – Looks at not just who is adopting but who is adopting for what kinds of tasks nber.org/system/files/w…

Studies like this are useful for quantifying impact of AI given uniform adoption. But adoption is not uniform, and those w/ high-skilled/education are more likely to adopt it---implying this equalizing effect will potentially flip in real-world data. aleximas.substack.com/p/who-uses-ai-…

we can write a million essays about how the future Silicon Valley wants to build is underwritten by a deep disgust with / contempt for Being A Human, or we can just let them speak for themselves

Last week @zhitzig wrote an article calling for deeper scrutiny of ads and consumer protections in AI. I have much more confidence than she does in OpenAI's direction and commitments on ads, but I believe she makes an important and credible argument about long-term oversight.

with thanks to @NewStatesman for publishing back then newstatesman.com/culture/poetry…

Thinking about this old poem of mine this week –

It’s Solution Sunday! We need federal AI regulation. Things are getting crazy and piecemeal state stuff is not gonna cut it. if you’re at an AI company, what is your policy team’s proposal/strategy here? Does it make any sense? Could you help make it better?

My message is optimistic actually: we still have time to do better than exclusion via $ or manipulation via ads. But we need public pressure – from people who know what’s at stake and have clear demands. Let’s make AI companies step up and earn our trust nytimes.com/2026/02/11/opi…

Full piece here nytimes.com/2026/02/11/opi…

I resigned from OpenAI on Monday. The same day, they started testing ads in ChatGPT. OpenAI has the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the tidal forces pushing them to abuse it? I wrote about better options for @nytopinion

My argument, in brief:

“We don’t have a grasp of what AI does to people’s psychology, what it does to them sociologically…” AI researcher Zoe Hitzig explains why she resigned from OpenAI #Newsnight

@BBCNewsnight @bysianharrison

It might be beneficial to both society and to OpenAI to explore ways the company could credibly commit to not letting ads bias responses or draw on overly personal data. For society, this helps stave off some concerning uses of AI and some of the ways it could erode the information environment. For OpenAI, this builds trust so they can run ads without their product losing users who worry about the motivations behind the responses they’re seeing. There are a variety of interesting institutional designs that might help with this, along the lines of the oversight board that Zoe refers to. The key is something that ties the company’s hands so it isn’t easy to change later.