Faculty Spotlight: Hannah Bailey
Hannah Bailey is an assistant professor in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology. Her research examines how authoritarian states develop and use emerging technologies, focusing on the goals and impacts of state-sponsored digital persuasion in the global public sphere.
Tell me about your scholarly work.
My work operates broadly in three main subfields of the social sciences, though focusing predominantly on political communication. Within this subfield of political science, I examine how elites and the general public communicate, and in particular, I focus on authoritarian states as the key elites, and to measure the “general public,” I use online discourse by international audiences. So oftentimes I'll study how authoritarian states, such as China, seek to spread particular messages at scale online toward global audiences.
A second part of my research is rooted in computational social science. I am currently developing methods that use cutting-edge machine learning computer science tools to unpack various components of communication at scale.
Third, I am seeking to understand the technologies themselves. For example, I want to better understand the specific technologies that these authoritarian states use to amplify their messages. I also explore how AI is a potential tool for amplifying certain types of narratives. And finally, my work aims to unpack how these technologies function, and how they can be used as a political tool.
How is your scholarly work adding to the greater field?
Within political science more broadly, my work tries to understand again how these political elites — whether authoritarian states, or even just individual political actors — are looking to use technology as a potentially manipulative communication tool. I think it's particularly important in the age of social media and increasing AI to understand how these tools can be used in the political context. And then extrapolated to the level of the social sciences, my ultimate goal is to enable my methodological toolkit to be used more widely as a framework to understand a wide spectrum of social phenomena.
How did you become interested in this topic?
Originally, I studied politics and philosophy as my undergraduate degree. I was bored one summer and decided to pick up a language. I wasn't very good at languages in school but decided to give it another go. However, I decided that I didn't want to study any of the more “popular” languages like French or German. I wanted to study Mandarin. So, I started Mandarin just for fun. I then went on a language exchange trip to China, and when I was there, I obviously experienced censorship firsthand. As an example, I wasn't able to use Google. And then I also experienced how differently the communication sphere operated in China as opposed to a democratic country like the U.K., with which I was most familiar. This experience sparked my interest and shaped my choices from there on. I was intrigued by how these different communication environments affected interactions between political elites and individuals. Things just progressed from there.
What are you most excited to accomplish as a faculty member at CMU?
I'm teaching the course, “A Strategist’s Introduction to AI,” and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Unpacking the concepts and interacting with students on these issues has been very rewarding. Let me give you an example: alignment. This issue raises serious questions, such as, to what degree can we align AI models with human values? How can we deal with sentience bias? Alignment, along with many other issues in AI, are certainly big picture questions that affect us all. It’s fascinating discussing these challenges with students. I would like to pursue more courses like this in my teaching for CMU.
On the research front, I have a couple of research publications in the pipeline, and I’m excited to see what the general scholarly response to those articles might be. For instance, I have research paper that looks at how the Chinese Communist Party uses images as a communication tool on international platforms and another paper that conducts an analysis of almost 700,000 Chinese Communist Party Facebook posts. So that's really exciting. Beyond that, I have aspirations for a book project that explores the risks of AI when used as a governance tool, and to what extent do people trust AI when it comes to government policies and government institutions? That is the longer-term plan, so very excited for all of those projects.
What are your goals for the next generation of scholars?
It was hard to predict 5-10 years ago that the field of AI governance would be as influential as it is now. I doubt that anyone truly could have seen that coming. So, my anticipation is that this trend continues and that scholars will just continue to study the emerging technologies and then continue to examine them critically. Ideally, they would seek to do this from an interdisciplinary perspective, as I think that different disciplines bring different insights to the table. Obviously, particularly Carnegie Mellon is a hugely interdisciplinary school, and so my hope is that CMU will be a key contributor, as it can enable social scientists to collaborate with computer scientists to really understand what's going on under-the-hood with these technologies, as well as their implications for real world outcomes My hope is that the next generation of scholars engages in interdisciplinary research to better understand these challenges.
The Faculty Spotlight series features new and junior faculty at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Stay tuned for our next installment to learn more about the dynamic and engaging research and scholarly work being conducted in the college.
