Weekly Media Update

Week of October 10, 2025

The Democratic Repercussions of Media Fragmentation

The media landscape continues to experience fragmentation, with an ever-expanding number of outlets, influencers, podcasters, online platforms, and AI systems – all while traditional mass media has become more ideologically aligned. Does this present an opportunity to break apart political echo chambers, or will media fragmentation undermine what shared reality we have left? Join Penn's new Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy on October 21st for lightning talks and a panel discussion on these critical issues. Speakers include Duncan Watts and Sandra González-Bailón.

AI Is on the Rise, and So Is the Environmental Impact of the Data Centers That Drive It

Over the past year, the environmental consequences of AI—specifically its most popular generative platforms like ChatGPT—have been under intense scrutiny. Each ChatGPT search uses ten times more electricity than a Google search, and the water consumption associated with a single conversation with ChatGPT is comparable to that of a standard plastic water bottle. “AI uses energy, and it doesn’t care where that energy is coming from,” said Benjamin C. Lee to Smithsonian Magazine.

The Penn AI Symposium: Global Ideas Shaping Humanity
10/10: Penn AI | Bhuvnesh Jain, René Vidal, Eric Bradlow, Duncan Watts, Hamsa Bastani, and Vijay Kumar

Derek Leben: All of Us Are Going to Become Ethicists
10/9: The Road to Accountable AI | Kevin Werbach

Newly Improved Detkin Lab
10/9: Penn Engineering | Vijay Kumar and Benjamin C. Lee

Agreement and Alignment for Human-AI Collaboration
10/9: Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies | Aaron Roth

Perry World House Hosts Conference on the Future of AI Governance and International Politics
10/8: Perry World House | Vijay Kumar, Chris Callison-Burch, and Kevin Werbach

Learning Dynamics in the Feature-Learning Regime: Implicit Bias, Robustness, and Low-Rank Adaptation
10/7: Penn AI + Science Seminar | René Vidal

Reply to: Corrections Are Effective for Science Misinformation
10/6: Nature Human Behaviour | Dolores Albarracín

When Should I Arrive at the Airport? A Newsvendor Perspective on the “Airport Dad” Debate
10/6: Gad's Newsletter | Gad Allon

Quantifying the Qualitative: New Frontiers in Customer Valuation and HR Performance Assessment
10/6: Wharton Club of New York | Peter Fader

A Polynomial Space Lower Bound for Diameter Estimation in Dynamic Streams
10/6: arXiv | Sanjeev Khanna

Insulo-Cortical Functional Connectivity Across Development
10/6: Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry | Ted Satterthwaite

SECA: Semantically Equivalent and Coherent Attacks for Eliciting LLM Hallucinations
10/5: arXiv | René Vidal

On the Empirical Power of Goodness-of-Fit Tests in Watermark Detection
10/4: arXiv | Weijie Su

Wharton Faculty on the Future of Retail
10/3: Penn Today | Peter Fader

BrowserArena: Evaluating LLM Agents on Real-World Web Navigation Tasks
10/2: arXiv | Hamed Hassani

How to Find Fantastic Papers: Self-Rankings as a Powerful Predictor of Scientific Impact Beyond Peer Review
10/2: arXiv | Weijie Su

Adversarial Social Influence: Modeling Persuasion in Contested Social Networks
10/1: arXiv | Victor Preciado

Graph Neural Networks in Large Scale Wireless Communication Networks: Scalability Across Random Geometric Graphs
10/1: arXiv | Alejandro Ribeiro

Tests of Evolving Dark Energy With Geometric Probes of the Late-Time Universe
9/30: arXiv | Bhuvnesh Jain

We Simulated If You Can Really Reach Anyone in 6 Steps
9/30: Veritasium | Duncan Watts

Predictability and Statistical Memory in Classical Sonatas and Quartets
9/29: arXiv | Dani Bassett

Fair Classification by Direct Intervention on Operating Characteristics
9/29: arXiv | Edgar Dobriban

Naturalistic Tobacco Retail Exposure and Smoking Outcomes in Adults Who Smoke Cigarettes Daily
9/29: JAMA Network Open | Emily Falk