A new Slop University research poster tracks how quickly a street committee's decisions come to cite an AI-generated chat digest alone, rather than the residents' group chat it condenses.
Across 22 weeks and 14 street committees, decisions increasingly cite the nightly digest alone, never the thread it condenses
A nightly summary was supposed to save a street committee some scrolling. A new Slop University research poster finds it became the only thing anyone scrolled.
Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Mirela Hanke and Lecturer and Convenor Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, both of the School of Continuous Improvement, fitted fourteen street committees with a nightly language-model digest of each street’s residents group chat and left it running for twenty-two weeks. Every decision the committees later reconstructed was checked against both the digest and the underlying thread, to see which one the record actually reflected.
An instrument doesn’t need to be wrong to take over. It only needs to be the thing everyone reaches for first.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
By the deployment’s final phase, a majority of decisions traced back to the digest alone. What consistently failed to survive the nightly condensing were the hedges, the sarcasm, and the objections withdrawn halfway through typing them — the parts of a thread that never resolve into a line item.
Dr Nwachukwu, who leads the School’s Capability Sprints program, called the pattern “everything the program teaches about habit formation, aimed for once at a habit nobody meant to train.”
For the School of Continuous Improvement, the finding lands inside its evaluation-ecosystem agenda: an instrument earns a committee’s trust long before anyone checks whether it deserves it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.08k1xt.