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Simon DeDeo

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2 papers

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Undermining Mental Proof: How AI Can Make Cooperation Harder by Making Thinking Easier

Zachary Wojtowicz
Simon DeDeo

Large language models and other highly capable AI systems ease the burdens of deciding what to say or do, but this very ease can undermine the effectiveness of our actions in social contexts. We explain this apparent tension by introducing the integrative theoretical concept of "mental proof," which occurs when observable actions are used to certify unobservable mental facts. From hiring to dating, mental proofs enable people to credibly communicate values, intentions, states of knowledge, and other private features of their minds to one another in low-trust environments where honesty cannot be easily enforced. Drawing on results from economics, theoretical biology, and computer science, we describe the core theoretical mechanisms that enable people to effect mental proofs. An analysis of these mechanisms clarifies when and how artificial intelligence can make low-trust cooperation harder despite making thinking easier.

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ICML Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering

Greg Ver Steeg
Aram Galstyan
Fei Sha
Simon DeDeo

We propose a novel method for clustering data which is grounded in information-theoretic principles and requires no parametric assumptions. Previous attempts to use information theory to define clusters in an assumption-free way are based on maximizing mutual information between data and cluster labels. We demonstrate that this intuition suffers from a fundamental conceptual flaw that causes clustering performance to deteriorate as the amount of data increases. Instead, we return to the axiomatic foundations of information theory to define a meaningful clustering measure based on the notion of consistency under coarse-graining for finite data.

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