AI4 Society Seminar | Mina Lee

Abstract: Does AI help or hurt our critical thinking? And why do people enjoy creating the very AI-generated content that others dismiss as “slop”? In this talk, I will present two recent studies from our group looking at how AI changes our reasoning and aesthetic judgments. First, debates about AI’s impact on critical thinking often focus on whether it helps or harms. In a preregistered experiment (n=393), we found that the answer depends on when AI becomes available and how much time people have. AI access from the start improved critical thinking performance under time pressure but impaired it when participants had sufficient time. Second, we turn to AI slop, the flood of low-effort AI-generated images online. In a preregistered experiment (n=648), we found that creating AI slop increased people's liking and perceived meaningfulness of similar images, even though their judgments of creators' effort and skill remained unchanged. These studies suggest that our interactions with AI can shape both how we think and what we like, raising questions about the design and use of AI systems.

Mina Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago. Her research examines the evolving relationship between people and AI, with a particular focus on writing, reading, and thinking with AI. She designs and evaluates AI systems, identifies opportunities and risks of AI-assisted writing, reading, and thinking, and measures AI's impact through user studies, controlled experiments, and surveys. Her work appears in both generalist journals (e.g., Nature Human Behavior) and top-tier conferences in HCI (e.g., CHI), NLP (e.g., ACL and NAACL), and ML (e.g., NeurIPS). She was named one of MIT Technology Review's Korean Innovators under 35 in 2022 and received the Young Faculty Award from the Korean Computer Scientists and Engineers Association in America (KOCSEA) in 2025. Her work on human-AI collaborative writing received an Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2022 and a Best Paper Award at CHI 2026 and was featured in various media outlets, including The Economist. She has co-founded and organized multiple workshops, including Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing), Human-centered Evaluation and Auditing of Language Models (HEAL), Tools for Thought (TfT), and Broader Impacts of GenAI in Communication at ACL, CHI, and CSCW.