BATCH
Beyond Alignment: Transdisciplinary Conversations on Human-AI Futures
We are pleased to share the program of the BATCH Workshop, which will take place on July 4, 2026, at ACL 2026 in San Diego. We welcome all interested participants. Please note ACL’s instructions for presenters here.
From chatbots for text and image creation, to coding tools and the design of assistive “agents,” technologists leverage LLMs for systems that they strive to “align” with human values and needs. At the same time, research on the social impacts and possibilities of new AI implementations are increasingly central to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Yet, opportunities to connect these efforts are surprisingly rare—curtailing the chance for researchers across disciplines to share up-to-date knowledge and collaborate on new ideas. This workshop offers an opportunity for technologists, humanists, and social scientists to bridge differences and establish common ground, discuss work in progress, and map out an interdisciplinary agenda for future research. We are grateful to our fellow scholars who have agreed to share their ideas and join the conversation: Idris Abdulmumin, Emily M. Bender, Su Lin Blodgett, David Leslie, and Michael McCarrin, and share the regrets of Michele Elam, who assisted us in preparing for the meeting but was unexpectedly unable to participate.
09:00 – 10:30 Values and Alignment
Opening Remarks
Matthew Stone
The Umbrella Coup: Alignment, LLMs, and the Misdirection of Ethics Discourse in NLP
Clémentine Bleuze, Fanny Ducel, Karën Fort, Aurélie Névéol and Emily M. Bender
10:30 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 12:00 A “Fishbowl” Conversation on Humanities and AI
Moderated by Mark Sammons
with Michael McCarrin, Malihe Alikhani, and Lauren M. E. Goodlad
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 15:30 Ethics and Alignment
“I Was a Young AI”: On Probing the Effectiveness of Intervening on Anthropomorphic AI System Outputs
Su Lin Blodgett, Myra Cheng and Alexandra Olteanu
Perspectives on Alignment from Low-Resource Languages
Idris Abdulmumin
Keynote presentation
Intelligence Just Ain’t in the Head: On Misrecognition and Mismeasurement in AGI Discourse
David Leslie
15:30 – 16:00 Break
16:00 – 18:00 Discussion and White Paper Planning
As organizers, we (Malihe Alikhani, Camille Gagnier, Lauren Goodlad, Dan Roth, Mark Sammons and Matthew Stone) hope BATCH becomes more than a one day gathering. In fact, the workshop follows up an earlier meeting at Rutgers in August 2025, which brought researchers across disciplines to Rutgers under the auspices of the Critical AI @ Rutgers Initiative, on the topic of Writing Education and Design-Oriented AI. One of the key lessons of that meeting was to problematize the frameworks and methods currently used in generative AI systems to pursue meaningful outcomes through language. Reinforcement learning methods, for example, often stumble on the complex objectives and fine-grained choices needed to support students who are learning to refine their writing practices.
The BATCH workshop continues this conversation. We hope it opens a space where people from different fields can think together with care, curiosity, and honesty about what AI is becoming and what we want it to become. Our goal is to leave with new questions, new collaborations, and the beginning of a shared agenda to help foster a broad community of practice—equally engaged with critical design perspectives and with technical challenges—to pursue new AI technologies collaboratively, inclusively, and in the public interest. We acknowledge the support of NSF Award 2427646 in making the workshop possible.