Mason Youngblood

Beyond Slop Visions for humane creative AI tools based on craft, process, and emergence.

Great essay about a different vision for creative AI by @joelsimon.bsky.social - "Beyond Slop" www.joelsimon.net/beyond-slop

Very cool paper here. I'm particularly intrigued by the finding that population size negatively predicts innovation since that has a nice resonance with some of our recent work (doi.org/10.1098/rstb...).

CE paper alert 🚨! Innovation and copying in speed climbers ->

This began in 2021 when I tweeted about the cultural evo of climbing and @sampassmore.bsky.social DMed me! So excited to see it out after 4 years of statistical binges and brick walls—I literally had to learn deep learning to finish it 😅 @royalsocietypublishing.org @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Simulation-based inference with deep learning suggests speed climbers combine innovation and copying to improve performance Abstract. In the Olympic sport of speed climbing, athletes compete to reach the top of a 15 m wall as quickly as possible. Since the standardization of the

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM

I've tested it with birds, bats, whales, chimpanzees, and humans, and it's recovered meaningful structure in all cases. I'll expanding it in the coming months/years so if you have any features you'd like to see just hit me up! 😊 Here's the preprint: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

The library provides an end-to-end workflow—from preprocessing and segmentation to model training and feature extraction—that enables researchers to quantify features like complexity, predictability, similarity, and novelty.

By leveraging a variety of different architectures, including variational autoencoders and vision transformers, chatter represents vocal sequences as trajectories in high-dimensional latent space, bypassing the need for manual or automatic categorization of units.

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5)

Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩

Link to study:
10.0.5.91/journal.pbio...

Co-authors:
@lucymaplin.bsky.social
@galarconnieto.bsky.social

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

Y'all these titles are getting out of control 😅

ESLR is currently undergoing a transition, and a new committee (@alexschakowski.bsky.social, @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social, @katebonner.bsky.social, @lucahahn.bsky.social, @mariapykala.bsky.social) is working on reinstating its presence and shaping its future. Please feel free to get in touch!

My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!

Career Development Fellowship | Royal Society This scheme provides the most talented early career scientists from underrepresented groups in STEM with research funding and high-quality training opportunities to build a strong base for a successfu...

Fancy joining us?
Check out this excellent @royalsociety.org Career Development Fellowship:
royalsociety.org/grants/caree...
If you're eligible & are interested in social behaviour, vocal communication or anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, feel free to DM or email me.
@bristolbiosci.bsky.social

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Congrats @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social!!!

Image showing Hobson Lab logo (with parakeets, a social network, and R code), two Monk Parakeets, and several individually-marked parakeets with the text "Now recruiting PhD students!!"

**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)

Tomorrow!

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco.

Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee:
Sarah Alami (co-chair)
Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair)
Zachary Garfield
Edmond Seabright

Keep yours eyes out for some incredible work from @sobchuk.bsky.social in the coming years 🥳

TechnoMirage · Luma Join us for Reclaim, Reimagine, Rewire, a 3-part journey that pierces through the illusion of creative progress projected by AI. TechnoMirage is a half-day…

Performing "Alaka'i 1777" at Index Space (NYC) on 9/21 for TechnoMirage—a creative gathering exploring AI and speculative futures. Come hear extinct birdsongs in immersive spatial audio! 🦜 lu.ma/xda8t4h1

Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵

🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards.

🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself.

The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

We are pleased to announce our newly elected committee members of the Cultural Evolution Society:

Minhua Yan @minhuayan.bsky.social
Helena Miton @helenamiton.bsky.social
Wataru Toyokawa @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social &
Mason Youngblood @masonyoungblood.bsky.social

Welcome and congratulations!!

Wild Resonance ep. 1: Animal Syntax in the Trees and Seas - a Conversation with Dr. Mason Youngblood YouTube video by Wild Resonance

Such a pleasure to be the first guest on the new bioacoustics podcast Wild Resonance! 🦜🐳

youtu.be/1gEI7Ihibac?...

I totally understand, and thanks for the apology. Always down to chat about this stuff—I know there's a lot to debate about these patterns in other species (and how meaningful they actually are in general). All the best to you as well!

Do I see that the data for hybrids, which has a minor role in the paper and the smallest N, is v noisy? 100%, I have eyes. But a trend line is only a coarse summary, especially when accounting for other sources of variation. More in the paper if you decide to check your ego and stop projecting. 🙂