Selected Publications

For a full list, see Google Scholar!

Sycophancy

1. Myra Cheng*, Sunny Yu*, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Lujain Ibrahim, Dan Jurafsky. Social Sycophancy: A Broader Understanding of LLM Sycophancy. [code]
   Press coverage by MIT Technology Review, NPR, and VentureBeat.

Anthropomorphic AI Outputs

1. Myra Cheng, Sunny Yu, Dan Jurafsky. HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs. ACL 2025. [code]

2. Myra Cheng, Su Lin Blodgett, Alicia DeVrio, Lisa Egede, Alexandra Olteanu. Dehumanizing Machines: Mitigating Anthropomorphic Behaviors in Text Generation Systems. ACL 2025 (Oral).
   ✩ SAC Highlights Award

3. Myra Cheng, Alicia DeVrio, Lisa Egede, Su Lin Blodgett, Alexandra Olteanu. “I Am the One and Only, Your Cyber BFF”: Understanding the Impact of GenAI Requires Understanding the Impact of Anthropomorphic AI. ICLR Blogposts 2025.

4. Alicia DeVrio, Myra Cheng, Lisa Egede, Alexandra Olteanu, Su Lin Blodgett. A Taxonomy of Linguistic Expressions That Contribute To Anthropomorphism of Language Technologies. CHI 2025.

AI Discourse, Public Perceptions, & Field-wide Impacts

1. Myra Cheng*, Angela Y. Lee*, Kristina Rapuano, Kate Niederhoffer, Alex Liebscher, Jeffrey Hancock. From tools to thieves: Measuring and understanding public perceptions of AI through crowdsourced metaphors. FAccT 2025.
   Press coverage by Fortune, Forbes, and New Scientist.

2. Pratyusha Ria Kalluri*, William Agnew*, Myra Cheng*, Kentrell Owens*, Luca Soldaini*, Abeba Birhane*. Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology. Nature 2025.
   Press coverage by Nature and 404 Media.

3. Lujain Ibrahim*, Myra Cheng*. Thinking beyond the anthropomorphic paradigm benefits LLM research. Under review.

4. Myra Cheng, Kristina Gligorić, Tiziano Piccardi, Dan Jurafsky. AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism. EACL 2024. [website] [slides] [code]
   Press coverage by Scientific American and New Scientist.

Caricatures, Stereotypes, and Bias

1. Myra Cheng, Tiziano Piccardi, Diyi Yang. CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulations. EMNLP 2023. [poster] [code]

2. Myra Cheng, Esin Durmus, Dan Jurafsky. Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models. ACL 2023. [slides] [code]
   ✩ Social Impact Award, Nominated for Best Paper

3. Federico Bianchi*, Pratyusha Kalluri*, Esin Durmus*, Faisal Ladhak*, Myra Cheng*, Debora Nozza, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Dan Jurafsky, James Zou, Aylin Caliskan. Easily accessible text-to-image generation amplifies demographic stereotypes at large scale. FAccT 2023.
   Press coverage by Nature, CBS News Prime Time, the Washington Post and MIT Technology Review.

4. Myra Cheng, Maria De-Arteaga, Lester Mackey, Adam Tauman Kalai. Social Norm Bias: Residual Harms of Fairness-Aware Algorithms. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2023. [code]

5. Laura Weidinger, John Mellor, Maribeth Rauh, Conor Griffin, Jonathan Uesato, Po-Sen Huang, Myra Cheng et al. Ethical and Social Risks of Harm from Language Models. FAccT 2022.