AJ Alvero

About

AJ Alvero is an Assistant Research Professor at the Cornell University Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society, with affiliations in the Departments of Information Science and Sociology, and membership in the Future of Learning Lab. His research focuses on questions about outward expression and personal essence, such as whether it is possible to separate the art from the artist, the author from the text, or the speaker from their speech. Using these questions as intellectual starting points, he examines culture, language, and social processes of evaluation, particularly in high-stakes settings like college admissions and parole hearings, through the analysis of massive amounts of data generated in these contexts. He leverages administrative, experimental, synthetic AI, and social media data to demonstrate how individual and shared identity shape human expression, aiming to better understand how demography and culture intersect to create the information that builds and fuels the technology used to sort, stratify, and organize social life. His work has increasingly drawn him toward examining the tools, methods, and frameworks used by researchers in these settings. AJ Alvero is a computational social scientist whose research addresses sociological inquiries related to artificial intelligence, culture, language, education, race and ethnicity, and organizational decision making. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Science Advances,…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Economics
• Social Science
• Social psychology
• Geography
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Large language models, social demography, and hegemony: comparing authorship in human and synthetic text

  Journal Of Big Data · 2024-09-27 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Large language models have become popular over a short period of time because they can generate text that resembles human writing across various domains and tasks. The popularity and breadth of use also put this technology in the position to fundamentally reshape how written language is perceived and evaluated. It is also the case that spoken language has long played a role in maintaining power and hegemony in society, especially through ideas of social identity and “correct” forms of language.…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Generative AI Meets Open-Ended Survey Responses: Research Participant Use of AI and Homogenization

  Sociological Methods & Research · 2025-05-07 · 19 citations

  articleSenior author

  The growing popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical tendencies in human versus large language model (LLM)-generated text responses. In an original survey of research participants recruited from a popular online platform for sourcing social science research subjects, 34 percent r…

  PublisherDOI

• Generative AI Meets Open-Ended Survey Responses: Research Participant Use of AI and Homogenization

  2025-02-24 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  The growing popularity of generative AI tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical tendencies in human vs LLM-generated text responses. In an original survey of participants recruited from a popular online platform for sourcing social science research subjects, 34% reported using LLMs to help them answer open-ended survey questions. S…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Income and Campus Application Disparities Among European and Non-European Heritage Hispanic Undergraduate Applicants

  2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  ** Final version published in PNAS Nexus (open access): https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae337/7738211 **Leveraging every undergraduate application submitted by self-identified Hispanic applicants to the University of California system in the 2016 and 2017 application cycles, we surface a phenomenon whereby a significant number of applicants claim Hispanic identity by virtue of European heritage. We subsequently demonstrate how Hispanic-identifying students of European descent ar…

  PublisherDOI

• Generative AI Meets Open-Ended Survey Responses: Research Participant Use of AI and Homogenization

  2024-09-20 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  The growing popularity of generative AI tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical tendencies in human vs LLM-generated text responses. In an original survey of participants recruited from a popular online platform for sourcing social science research subjects, 34% reported using LLMs to help them answer open-ended survey questions. S…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Anthony Lising Antonio

  17 shared

• Sonia Giebel

  WZB Berlin Social Science Center

  14 shared

• Ben Gebre-Medhin

  Mount Holyoke College

  11 shared

• Mitchell L. Stevens

  Stanford University

  8 shared

• Benjamin W. Domingue

  8 shared

• Rebecca Pattichis

  6 shared

• Courtney Peña

  Stanford University

  6 shared

• Leslie Patricia Luqueño

  Stanford University

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology of Education; Education Data Science

  Stanford University

  2022

• MS, Statistics

  Stanford University

  2021

• MS, Foreign Language Education

  Florida International University

  2016

• BA, English

  University of Miami

  2012

Similar researchers at Cornell University

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• Barum Parkh-62
• Bryan L. Sykesh-59